We have just got home from Killaloe, and mean to remain here all through the summer.  After leaving your sisters this house seems so desolate; but I shall have the more time to think of you.  I have been reading Tennyson, as you told me, and I fancy that I could in truth be a Mariana here, if it were not that I am so quite certain that you will come;—­and that makes all the difference in the world in a moated grange.  Last night I sat at the window and tried to realise what I should feel if you were to tell me that you did not want me; and I got myself into such an ecstatic state of mock melancholy that I cried for half an hour.  But when one has such a real living joy at the back of one’s romantic melancholy, tears are very pleasant;—­ they water and do not burn.

I must tell you about them all at Killaloe.  They certainly are very unhappy at the idea of your resigning.  Your father says very little, but I made him own that to act as you are acting for the sake of principle is very grand.  I would not leave him till he had said so, and he did say it.  Dear Mrs. Finn does not understand it as well, but she will do so.  She complains mostly for my sake, and when I tell her that I will wait twenty years if it is necessary, she tells me I do not know what waiting means.  But I will,—­and will be happy, and will never really think myself a Mariana.  Dear, dear, dear Phineas, indeed I won’t.  The girls are half sad and half proud.  But I am wholly proud, and know that you are doing just what you ought to do.  I shall think more of you as a man who might have been a Prime Minister than if you were really sitting in the Cabinet like Lord Cantrip.  As for mamma, I cannot make her quite understand it.  She merely says that no young man who is going to be married ought to resign anything.  Dear mamma;—­sometimes she does say such odd things.

You told me to tell you everything, and so I have.  I talk to some of the people here, and tell them what they might do if they had tenant-right.  One old fellow, Mike Dufferty,—­I don’t know whether you remember him,—­asked if he would have to pay the rent all the same.  When I said certainly he would, then he shook his head.  But as you said once, when we want to do good to people one has no right to expect that they should understand it.  It is like baptizing little infants.

I got both your notes;—­seven words in one, Mr. Under-Secretary, and nine in the other!  But the one little word at the end was worth a whole sheet full of common words.  How nice it is to write letters without paying postage, and to send them about the world with a grand name in the corner.  When Barney brings me one he always looks as if he didn’t know whether it was a love letter or an order to go to Botany Bay.  If he saw the inside of them, how short they are, I don’t think he’d think much of you as a lover nor yet as an Under-Secretary.

But I think ever so much of you as both;—­I