"Oh, I don't feel like that in the least; but sometimes I am lonely—very!"
And in truth it is a very wistful face that watches pretty Belle hurrying down the avenue. Honor has grown very thin and pale of late, and to-night, in her white gown, she looks thinner and paler than ever. She is feeling the need of a friend sorely. Often Brian Beresford's words come back—"If ever you should want me, either as friend or lover, send for me, and I will come."
She wants him now—his friendship, she feels, would be a stay and shield for her—but she never dreams of taking him at his word, and asking him to come back to Donaghmore.
She is feeling unusually depressed as she looks out at the sky, which is slowly changing from pink and opal to a sullen gray.
A morbid dread has been upon her all the day, and the sighing of the wind in the pine-trees—for a storm is rising over a neighboring mountain—does not tend to make her more cheerful. She stands a little while watching the grass bending before the breeze and the dead leaves swirling and eddying round on the smooth-cropped lawn.
"The rain will be coming down before Aileen could get half-way home," she says to herself, and straightway goes down to the kitchen to forbid her old nurse's departure.
The old woman is sitting before the fire, her head slightly turned, as if she were listening.
At the sound of Honor's step on the tiled floor she springs upright.
"How ye startled me, honey! Shure in that soft white gown ye might pass for one of the blessed saints themselves. I took ye for a spirit—I did an' troth, Miss Honor, at the first glance."
She seems unusually tired and excited, but she will not hear of staying for the night at Donaghmore.