CHAPTER VI
“Is there any news of the doctor?” asked Lord Manton.
He was standing on the steps outside the door of Clonmore Castle. He had just given Patsy Devlin a sovereign for the Horse Races and Athletic Sports, and was endeavouring to cut short the thanks with which the subscription was received.
“There is not, your lordship, devil the word; and why would there? It could be that he’s on the sea by this time, and, anyway, why would he be wanting to tell us where he is? Isn’t it enough of their persecuting he had without going out of his way to ask for more?”
Lord Manton, like everybody else, regarded Dr. O’Grady’s flight to America as the natural result of his financial embarrassment. He was sorry; but he recognized that the doctor had taken the wisest course.
“Might I be speaking a word to your lordship about the doctor?”
“Certainly, Patsy.”
“It’s what Jimmy O’Loughlin was saying to me that there’d be no need, if your lordship was agreeable to the same, to be telling the young lady the way the doctor is gone off and left her without a word. She has trouble enough, the creature, without that.”
“What young lady?”