"And Launce ought to have had more sense than to talk to the pater about it," she says to herself, as she watches the squire's anxious face. "He ought to have remembered that the last time that horrid old abbot was seen about poor grandpapa was shot; and of course everybody said the abbot had come to warn him."
CHAPTER V.
After that night no more is seen or heard of the old abbot.
"Wait till the moonlight nights are past, and he'll turn up again,"
Launce says in his scoffing way.
But the nights are dark enough now—it is an almost sunless September, and yet they see nothing of the figure. To Honor has come an additional trouble—the engagement between her brother and Belle Delorme is broken off. Poor little Belle goes about like a ghost; her miserable eyes, which go so far to contradict the smile on her lips, fairly haunt Honor.
"If Launce ever loved her he could not bear to see her looking like that!" the girl says, in her angry surprise that he, her favorite brother, should prove so cruel. But Launce just now has eyes for no one but Kate Dundas.
The widow is more fascinating than ever. Two gentlemen are staying on a visit with her, one from London and one—who is eyed with suspicious disfavor by her poorer neighbors—from Dublin Castle itself.
There are dinners or card-parties almost every night, and, to use a vulgar expression, Launce Blake is never off the doorstep.
People are beginning to say that he will marry her and snap his fingers at the old squire, who, for some reason best known to himself, is no admirer of the brilliant widow.
"It's the greatest pity in the world that you couldn't keep your temper!" Honor says reproachfully to her friend, when she comes to tell her that the engagement is at an end. "I always told you Launce would not stand being found fault with; sure a child could lead him."