“Open the window, Mary,” he urged. “Just an inch.”
“Sure I can’t; it’s nailed fast! Are ye up at the Castle?”
“Up at the Castle they think I am in Queenstown. My mother was very rude to you, I’m afraid; she has a hot temper, poor woman, and she believes the Dorans are next door to royalty. She would like me to marry an earl’s daughter. I’ll never marry now, and I must go. God bless you. I wish I could shake you by the hand, but I won’t ask to come in——” He paused, and stared hard at her. “Mary, look here. Will you kiss me through the window? It won’t be a real kiss, you know, but it will be something for me to carry away, and a sign you cared for me—here, just on this little star.”
As she nodded quickly, he bent his head, removed his cap, and pressed his lips on the pane. Mary too leant forward, and deliberately laid hers on the self-same spot. Then he stepped back and looked at her with misty eyes that said farewell. Suddenly he, with a vehement and pathetic gesture, waved his hand, and vanished.
Mary Foley spent the remainder of that unhappy night rocking to and fro and sobbing in a chair. Her heart was broken, she told herself—broken, broken, broken! What was the good of living at all, when she could never again lay an eye on Mr. Ulick, and Mr. Ulick loved her! Struggling through the eclipse of grief, that truth shone like a fixed star.
Meanwhile a light, active figure might be seen, running or walking by turns along a short cut which led to a junction over the hills nine miles away. Ulick Doran had to catch a mail train at one o’clock. If he missed it, he would forfeit his passage in the trooper lying at Queenstown, and be reported absent without leave.
He had dallied too long with his love, and now it became a race for his commission, and his career. In the still cool night he fancied he heard the train approaching miles away, the faint, muffled rumble becoming more and more distinct. He ran the last mile downhill at extraordinary speed, and dashed into the junction just as the signal was lowered, and the night mail to Cork came thundering over the points.
“It had been a narrow shave, and he had only just done it,” Ulick said to himself, as he sat in a corner of an empty smoking carriage. When the express moved on, he seemed every now and then to see Mary Foley’s beautiful wistful face gazing at him from the other side of the glass.
But no; it was a mirage—a mere mocking fancy! All that was visible through the clear pane, was the flying landscape, the high full moon, and the melancholy dark mountains of his native land.