Womanlike, she was not over pleased that he should permit his private worries to take the edge off his pen when he was writing to her, and she determined to leave the letter unanswered.
CHAPTER IX
It was November, and it had been raining for a week.
The sun had vanished, the hills had vanished, the land had all but vanished—nothing remained but the wind and the rain, the rain and the wind.
Effie's short lessons only consumed a couple of hours of each rain-soaked, wind-blown day. No one ever came to Drumgool except, maybe, a farmer now and then to see Mr. French; and the long-drawn "hoo-hoo" of the wind through the Devil's Keyhole, the rattling of windows fighting with the wind, and the tune of wastepipes emptying into over-full waterbutts were beginning to prey upon Miss Grimshaw's nerves.
Even Mr. Giveen would have been a distraction these times; but Mr. Giveen was now at open enmity with his kinsman, and spoiling with all the bitterness of his petty nature to do him an injury.
And Giveen was not French's only enemy just now. The United Irish League was against him. He had let farms on the eleven months' system, and he had let farms for grazing, two high offences in the eyes of the league.
"The time has come to put an end to the big grazing ranches and to plant the people on the soil," says the league, as though the people were seed potatoes. "You mustn't take a farm on an eleven-month agreement," goes on this Areopagus of plunderers and short-sighted patriots. "For," continues the league, "if you do, we'll drive the cattle off your land with hazel sticks, and on you we will commit every dirty outrage that the black heart of a low-down Irishman can invint, Begob!" And they do.