"Maybe she has," Honor assents coldly.
"And they are saying too," Belle goes on more gravely, and looking anxiously at her friend, "that the two men who were with Power Magill have got off to America. I'm sure I hope it is true!"
Honor says not a word. She is thinking of the man who is left a homeless wanderer on his native mountains—an exile within sight of his own walls!
"It's an awful pity about poor Power, isn't it, Honor? Sometimes I cry my eyes red thinking of him," Belle goes on in her pretty plaintive voice; "and I often think he must have gone with the rest to Donaghmore to keep them in order. He couldn't have gone, you know, to—to do any harm!"
Honor looks at her gratefully, and the words linger in her mind and comfort her in some vague way during her long and lonely walk to Donaghmore.
The sun has set as she enters the gates, and a mist which has crept up from the river makes the wide empty space on her left, as she walks up toward the house, look more like a lake than solid earth.
She has left the ruins behind her, not without a nervous shiver in passing, when the sound of a step, falling lightly but regularly on the strip of grass by the side of the drive, arrests her attention and sets her heart beating rapidly.
"It is all my own foolish fancy," she says to herself, and walks faster.
The step follows faster too. She stops, and instantly that light footfall is silent. Not a creature is to be seen. The old ruins rise grim and bare between her and the pale evening sky, but not a sound comes from them.
"It must have been my own fancy," she tells herself, and, reassured, starts forward almost at a run.