And now Miss Priscilla has come, and is standing beside the bed of her quondam friend, looking down upon him with dim eyes.
"I am sorry to meet you again like this, George Desmond," she says, at last, in tones meant to be full of relentless displeasure, but which falter strangely.
"She made as great a fool of you as of me, Priscilla," is the squire's answer, whose tired mind can only grasp one thought,—the treachery of the woman he had loved! And then it all comes out, and the letter the false Katherine had written him is brought out from a little secret drawer, bound round with the orthodox blue ribbon, and smelling sadly of dust, as though to remind one of all things, of warmest sweetest love, of truest trust, and indeed of that fair but worthless body from whose hand it came, now lying mouldering and forgotten in a foreign land.
"Oh, I wouldn't have believed it of her!" says Miss Priscilla, weeping bitterly. "But there must have been something wrong with her always, though we could never see it. What an angel face she had! But the children, they speak terribly of her, and they say—that she—and James [Beresford]—did not get on at all."
"Eh?" says the squire. He rises himself on his sound elbow, and quite a glow of color rushes into his pallid cheeks. When, with a groan of self-contempt, he sinks back again, and the light in his eye (was it of satisfaction?) dies.
"You have met Brian," he says presently. "What do you think of him, Priscilla? He is a good lad,—a very good lad."
"He looks it," says Miss Priscilla, shortly.
"He does," heartily. "Well, I'm told this boy of mine is in love with your girl."
"Who told you?" says Miss Priscilla.