“I engaged to Willy!” I cried hotly. “How could he have——”
The words died on my lips; I could not now dispute about anything Uncle Dominick had said.
“He said more than that,” said Nugent, coming and standing over me; “he said he thought—he was pretty sure, in fact—that you wanted me to know it” (reddening at the recollection), “and so then, of course——”
It was a hard thing to hear. The falsehood had come near spoiling both our lives, and with the thought of it the remembrance of the time that was over came like a wave about me—the wretchedness and bewilderment, the heart-ache and the hidden strivings with it, the effort for Willy’s sake. I looked up into the troubled blue eyes that were fixed on mine, and, with such a reaction from pain as comes seldom in a life, I stretched out both my hands.
“Oh, Nugent,” I said, calling him by his name for the first time, “why did you believe it?”
He took hold of my hands, and knelt down beside me. “I think,” he said, in a low voice, “because I loved you so much.”
I could not now say more than this, even to Nugent. Uncle Dominick had only been buried this morning, and all that had happened that last afternoon was still fresh in my mind. They had recovered his body from the bog hole the same night, after long searching, and a telegram had been sent to try and catch Willy before he started. But it had been too late; he and Anstey had sailed for Melbourne a few hours before the telegram had gone, and now a second message had been sent to Melbourne to await his arrival there. There had been very few at the funeral, Nugent said; he and his father, and old Mr. McCarthy, the solicitor, and Dr. Kelly, who had conducted the inquest, were, with the Durrus servants, the only people there.
“They went by the old road across the bog,” he said, in answer to a question from me. “It was a lovely morning, just like spring. I looked at Poul-na-coppal as we walked past, and you can see at once that something unusual has happened there. The banks are all muddy and trampled, and the heather and bog myrtle that used to grow round it are torn and broken down. You wouldn’t know it.”
“Not know Poul-na-coppal! I wish I could think I should ever forget it.”
“They had had the mausoleum opened,” Nugent went on. “I can just remember seeing it open before, when I was six years old, and they took me to old Theodore’s funeral—by way of a treat. It’s an awful old place.”