"Owen Fitzgerald!" she said, starting up and giving him both her hands. This she did, not of judgment, nor yet from passion, but of impulse. She had been thinking of him with such kindly thoughts, and now he was there it became natural that her greeting should be kindly. It was more so than it had ever been to any but her son since the wrinkled, gloating earl had come and fetched her.
"Yes, Owen Fitzgerald," said he, taking the two hands that were offered to him, and holding them awhile; not pressing them as a man who loved her, who could have loved her, would have done. "After all that has gone and passed between us, Lady Desmond, I cannot leave the country without saying one word of farewell to you."
"Leave the country!" she exclaimed. "And where are you going?"
As she looked into his face with her hands still in his,—for she did not on the moment withdraw them, she felt that he had never before looked so noble, so handsome, so grand. Leave the country! ah, yes; and why should not she leave it also? What was there to bind her to those odious walls in which she had been immolated during the best half of her life?
"Where are you going?" she asked, looking almost wildly up at him.
"Somewhere very far a-field, Lady Desmond," he said; and then the hands dropped from him. "You will understand at any rate that Hap House will not be a fitting residence for me."
"I hate the whole country," said she, "the whole place hereabouts. I have never been happy here. Happy! I have never been other than unhappy. I have been wretched. What would I not give to leave it also?"
"To you it cannot be intolerable as it will be to me. You have known so thoroughly where all my hopes were garnered, that I need not tell you why I must go from Hap House. I think that I have been wronged, but I do not desire that others should think so. And as for you and me, Lady Desmond, though we have been enemies, we have been friends also."
"Enemies!" said she, "I hope not." And she spoke so softly, so unlike her usual self, in the tones so suited to a loving, clinging woman, that though he did not understand it, he was startled at her tenderness. "I have never felt that you were my enemy, Mr. Fitzgerald; and certainly I never was an enemy to you."
"Well; we were opposed to each other. I thought that you were robbing me of all I valued in life; and you, you thought—"