The turf fire, with soft noises of subsidence, had sunk lower and lower in the grate, and, abandoning its effort to light up the heavy lines of bookshelves, now did little more than edge with a feeble glow the shadow of the chimney-piece upon the ceiling. A few minutes before, a flicker had leaped up from the red embers; it had not lasted long, but the transient glare had made my eyes ache. For two or three seconds afterwards the blackened fragments of a sheet of note-paper had been shaken and lifted uncertainly by the thin turf smoke, and they were now drifting away with it up the chimney. My hand, lying open upon my knee, still retained the sensation of holding something which had been clasped tightly in it all the afternoon—the letter which I had just burnt—and it seemed to me that in my heart there was the same sense of emptiness and loss.

It had cost me something to burn it, and as the flame crept over the pages, I had come near snatching it back again. But after all there was no need to keep it; its contents were not so long nor so intricate, I thought bitterly, that there was any fear of my forgetting them.

“Dear Miss Sarsfield” (it began),

“My sister has asked me to tell you that she has been obliged to change her plans, and is leaving Clashmore to-morrow instead of next week. She desires me to say how sorry she is at having to give up the ride to Mount Prospect, and to go away without seeing you. She would write herself, but is too much hurried. I fear that I must make the same apologies on my own account, as I find that I shall have to go to London in a few days, and may possibly not return before the summer; and, as I am afraid I shall not be able to get over to Durrus, perhaps you will kindly let me say good-bye by letter.

“Sincerely yours,
“Nugent O’Neill.”

Nothing could have been more simply put; nothing could have expressed more incisively the writer’s meaning. Even in the first moment of reading it, I had been at no loss to understand it. In the legitimate amusement of flirting with “An American girl,” he had gone a little farther than he had intended, and he now lost no time in removing any undue impression that his words might have made upon her. What was it that Willy had told me long ago—how long ago?—“He could tell you many a queer story of a Yankee girl he met at Cannes!”

Possibly he would now be able to add another “queer story of a Yankee girl” to his repertoire—how, in the course of a most ordinary flirtation, he had discovered one afternoon that this girl was losing her head, and how he had been obliged to leave the country so as to avoid further difficulties.

The last scrap of the letter fluttered upwards out of sight as this idea, which it had suggested, came into my mind. The intolerable sting of the thought acted on me like physical pain. I started up, but by the time I was on my feet I was ashamed of it. “No,” I said to myself vehemently, “he would never do that; I have no right even to think it of him. And although, I suppose, he has changed his mind now for some reason or other, I know he was in earnest when he was speaking to me; I am sure of it. Perhaps he lost his head too—men very often say more than they intend—and then when he got home he thought better of it, and felt it was only fair to let me understand as soon as possible that he meant nothing serious. How could I have been such a fool as to let half a dozen words upset my peace of mind?” I asked myself desperately. “Whatever he meant by them, it is no use my thinking about him any more. I had better begin at once, as he has done, to try and forget it all,” I thought, as I groped my way out of the room; “but just now I feel as if it would take me all my life.”

As I dressed for dinner, I shrank from the prospect of the long difficult hours that lay between me and the solitude of my own room. But I think that my powers of further suffering must have been exhausted; a benumbing weariness was my only sensation as I sat at the dinner-table, and, looking from my uncle to my cousin, felt, in some far-off way, that our lives were converging to their point of closest contact, perhaps to their climax of mutual suffering.

I had not energy to talk, and I occupied myself for the most part in efforts to keep up the semblance of eating my dinner. Willy went on with his in a kind of resigned surliness, taking as little notice of me as was compatible with common politeness. This state of things I should much have preferred to any open signs of enmity or friendship, if I had not noticed that my uncle was narrowly observing us, and was even making various attempts to involve us both in the conversation, which had hitherto been little more than a monologue upon his part. Beyond an occasional grunt, Willy did not even try to respond; and as for me, though I did my best, utter mental and bodily fatigue made the framing of a sentence too laborious for me.