"But you can all of you understand," continued Herbert, "that as this place is no longer our own, we are obliged to leave it; and as we shall live in a very different way in the home to which we are going, we are obliged to part with you, though we have no reason to find fault with any one among you. I am going to-morrow morning early, and my mother and sisters will follow after me in a few weeks. It will be a sad thing too for them to say good-bye to you all, as it is for me now; but it cannot be helped. God bless you all, and I hope that you will find good masters and kind mistresses, with whom you may live comfortably, as I hope you have done here."
"We can't find no other mistresses like her leddyship," sobbed out the senior housemaid.
"There ain't niver such a one in the county Cork," said the cook; "in a week of Sundays you wouldn't hear the breath out of her above her own swait nathural voice."
"I've driv' her since iver—" began Richard; but he was going to say since ever she was married, but he remembered that this allusion would be unbecoming, so he turned his face to the door-post, and began to wail bitterly.
And then Herbert shook hands with them all, and it was pretty to see how the girls wiped their hands in their aprons before they gave them to him, and how they afterwards left the room with their aprons up to their faces. The women walked out first, and then the men, hanging down their heads, and muttering as they went, each some little prayer that fortune and prosperity might return to the house of Fitzgerald. The property might go, but according to their views Herbert was always, and always would be, the head of the house. And then, last of all, Richard went. "There ain't one of 'em, Mr. Herbert, as wouldn't guv his fist to go wid yer, and think nothing about the wages."
He was to start very early, and his packing was all completed that night. "I do so wish we were going with you," said Emmeline, sitting in his room on the top of a corded box, which was to follow him by some slower conveyance.
"And I do so wish I was staying with you," said he.
"What is the good of staying here now?" said she; "what pleasure can there be in it? I hardly dare to go outside the house door for fear I should be seen."
"But why? We have done nothing that we need be ashamed of."
"No; I know that. But, Herbert, do you not find that the pity of the people is hard to bear? It is written in their eyes, and meets one at every turn."