"Come and tell me all about it, dearest," said he, holding out his hand to her.
She seated herself beside him, and detailed her interview with Herman, brightening the brighter parts, and subduing the darker, with exquisite pious tact; and then, turning from the subject of her own plans, which always fretted the old gentleman, enquired what his movements had been, and if there was a letter from the Winters?
"No, none," said the Colonel.
"Well, I will go and get ready for dinner, and afterwards we will have a short stroll in the gardens. Perhaps this evening's post may bring us a letter from our friends. Nurse is a capital chaperone, and I am glad you did not go, dear grandpapa, it would have been quite too much for you."
After this nothing could surpass the unbroken but rather gloomy quiet, in which Kate's days slipped by; her piano having arrived, was a great source of enjoyment to her, and lent wings to many a heavy hour.
Winter, though kind, was like most men, a tardy correspondent, and Kate was ashamed of writing as often as her heart dictated. Lady Desmond, too, engrossed by some new pleasure or occupation, wrote, though affectionately, but seldom; and at times the sad feeling, that to the friends who are afar, we are as nothing, scarcely missed, and merely remembered, through the importunate efforts of our own pen, would steal over Kate's mind in spite of every effort of reason and common sense; for hers was a nature too noble, too unexacting, to doubt the kindness or the truth of those who professed either. Yet it is hard, very hard, not to become restless and complaining, when, day after day, the letter carrier hurries past, or worse still, his startling, though hoped for, knock, thrills every pulse, and there is nothing for you. Oh, you who are still left in peace and security, amongst all that has been endeared to you in childhood and in youth; amongst kindred and familiar faces; and scenes of beauty associated with happiness, and disregarded in the full certainty of possession; think well before you charge the absent with querulous avidity for letters; you cannot know, you cannot dream the intense longing with which we turn from the looks and tones, the places and the people around us, and conjure up old scenes and voices, long unheard; and then ask again, and again, with a mournful tenderness, unspeakable in its depth, "Shall I never see them more?" while a gloomy echo from our own unspoken presage answers, "they are gone—they are all passed by;" ay, passed indeed, for what is gone is eternally passed by. "Speak to them that they go forward," is the message of God to mankind, as to the Israelites of old; forward we must go, on—on, in sin or in righteousness; there is no pause, and what is left is left for ever!
Kate felt an extraordinary longing to have the old hound, Cormac, with her once more, and wrote on the subject to Mr. Winter. As usual, when any positive question was to be answered, his reply was prompt.
"Cannot you leave the dog where he is?" wrote the testy little artist, "I tell you he will be a troublesome customer; even here he is quite savage, and we have to throw him his meat from a civil distance."
"Poor Cormac!" sighed Kate, who was reading the letter aloud to her grandfather, "how unhappy he must be, when he is so cross; he will become irretrievably savage if we do not remove him; may I write about him, dear grandpapa, at once?"