“Not in the least. I never intended to have alarmed you, however.”
“Then it was no runaway?” said she, essaying a smile.
“I 'm ashamed to say I have not that excuse for so rudely trampling over your neat sward. Will Mr. Corrigan forgive me?”
“Of course he will, if he even ever knows that he has anything to forgive; but it so happens that he has gone into the village to-day,—an excursion he has not made for nigh a year. He wished to consult our friend the doctor on some matter of importance, and I half suspect he may have stayed to share his dinner.”
As Miss Leicester continued to make this explanation, they had reached the drawing-room, which, to Cashel's amazement, exhibited tokens of intended departure. Patches here and there on the walls showed where pictures had stood. The bookshelves were empty, the tables displayed none of those little trifling objects which denote daily life and its occupations, and his eye wandered over the sad-looking scene till it came back to her, as she stood reading his glances, and seeming to re-echo the sentiment they conveyed. “All this would seem to speak of leave-taking,” said Cashel, in a voice that agitation made thick and guttural.
“It is so,” said she, with a sigh; “we are going away.”
“Going away!” Simple as the words are, we have no sadder sounds in our language; they have the sorrowful cadence that bespeaks desertion; they ring through the heart like a knell over long-past happiness; they are the requiem over “friends no more,” and of times that never can come back again.
“Going away!” How dreary does it sound,—as if life had no fixed destination in future, but that we were to drift over its bleak ocean, the “waifs” of what we once had been!
“Going away!” cried Cashel. “But surely you have not heard—” He stopped himself; another word, and his secret had been revealed,—the secret he had so imperatively enjoined Tiernay to keep; for it was his intention to have left Ireland forever ere Mr. Corrigan should have learned the debt of gratitude he owed him. It is true, indeed, that one night of sleepless reflection had suggested another counsel, but had altered not his desire that the mystery should be preserved.
He was confused, therefore, at the peril he had so narrowly escaped, and for a moment was silent; at length he resumed, in a tone of assumed ease,—