For herself, she said to herself no love could cheer her. Captain Clayton still hung about Tuam and Headford, but his presence in the neighbourhood was always to be attributed to the evidence of which he was in search as to Florian's death. It seemed now with him that the one great object of his heart was the unravelling of that murder. "It was no mystery," as he said over and over again in Edith's hearing. He knew very well who had fired the rifle. He could see, in his mind's eye, the slight form of the crouching wretch as he too surely took his aim from the temporary barricade. The passion had become so strong with him of bringing the man to justice that he almost felt, that between him and his God he could swear to having seen it. And yet he knew that it was not so. To have the hanging of that man would be to him a privilege only next to that of possessing Edith Jones. And he was a sanguine man, and did believe that in process of time both privileges would be vouchsafed to him.
But Edith was less sanguine. She could not admit to herself the possibility that there should be successful love between her and her hero. His presence there in the neighbourhood of her home was stained by constant references to her brother's blood. And then, though there was no chance for Ada, Ada's former hopes militated altogether against Edith. "He had better go away and just leave us to ourselves," she said to herself. But yet neither was she nor was Ada sunk so low in heart as her father and her brother.
"Frank," she said to her brother, "whom do you think this letter is from?" and she held up in her hand Rachel's epistle.
"I care not at all, unless it be from that most improbable of all creatures, a tenant coming to pay his rent."
"Nothing quite so beautiful as that."
"Or from someone who has evidence to give about some of these murders that are going on?"—A Mr. Morris from the other side of the lake, in County Mayo, had just been killed, and the minds of men were now disturbed with this new horror.—"Anybody can kill anybody who has a taste in that direction. What a country for a man with his family to pitch upon and live in! And that all this should have been kept under so long by policemen and right-thinking individuals, and then burst out like a subterranean fire all over the country, because the hope has been given them of getting their land for nothing! In order to indulge in wholesale robbery they are willing at a moment's notice to undertake wholesale murder."
After listening to words such as these, Edith found it impossible to introduce Rachel's letter on the spur of the moment.