“Where was I? Oh, I remember. ‘He gave me the letter back,’ says I, ‘and told the servants to see I had my supper, and everything I wanted.
“‘He did this with his hand, as much as to say, “You may go away;” but I made as if I didn’t understand him, and I waited till the servant left the place, and then I drew near him, and said:
“‘I think,’ says I, ‘it would be better your honour read the letter, anyhow. Maybe there’s something in it that you don’t suspect.’
“‘"Who are you,” says he, “that’s teaching me manners?”’
“I didn’t say them was his words, but something that meant the same.
“‘"I know every line that’s in it. I know far better than you—ay, or than she suspects—the game she would play.”’
“She gave a little cry, as if something stung her. Andeed, I asked her, What was it hurt her? But she never answered me, but stood up straight, and, with a hand up this way, she said something to herself, as if she was making a vow or taking an oath. After that, it wasn’t much she minded one word I said, and lucky for me it was, for I was coming to the hard part of my story—about your honour; how you heard from the servants that I was in the house, and sent for me to your own room, and asked me hundreds of questions about her. Where she was, and who with, and what she wrote about, and then how angry you grew with your uncle—I called him your uncle, I don’t know why—and how you said he was an unfeeling old savage, that it was the same way he treated yourself, pampering you one day, turning you out of doors the next. ‘And at last,’ says I—‘I couldn’t keep it in any longer—I up and told him what I came about, and that your letter was asking a trifle of money to defend your grandfather for his life.’
“Sorrow matter what I said, she never listened to me. I told her you swore that her grandfather should have the first lawyer in the land, and that you’d come over yourself to the Assizes. I told her how you put twenty pounds into my hand, and said, ‘Tim’—no, not Tim—‘Mr. O’Rorke, there’s a few pounds to begin. Go back and tell Miss Kate she has a better and truer friend than the one she lost; one that never forgot the first evening he seen her, and would give his heart’s blood to save her.’
“She gave a little smile—it was almost a laugh once—and I thought she was pleased at what I was telling her. Not a bit of it. It was something about the ould man was in her mind, and something that didn’t mean any good to him either, for she said, ‘He shall rue it yet.’ And after that, though I talked for an hour, she never minded me no more than them fireirons! At last she clutched my arm in her fingers, and said, “‘Do you know that my uncle declares I am never to go back again? I came away against his will, and he swore that if I crossed the threshold to come here, I should never re-cross it again. Do you know,’ says she, ‘I have no home nor friend now in the whole world, and I don’t know what’s to become of me.’
“I tried to comfort her, and say that your honour would never see her in any distress; but she wasn’t minding me, and only went on saying something about being back again; but whether it meant at the Castle, or over in Arran, or, as I once thought, back as a child, when she used to play in the caves along the sea-shore, I couldn’t say, but she cried bitterly, and for the whole day never tasted bit or sup. We stopped at a small house outside the town, and I told them it was a young creature that lost her mother; and the next day she looked so ill and wasted, I was getting afraid she was going to have a fever; but she said she was strong enough, and asked me to bring her on here to the gaol, for she wanted to see her grandfather.