“I went out of the house ashamed, Miss Moffat. I vowed to myself I never would ask her again, and I kept as much away as I could from Maryville, until after that morning when she stole into Kingslough, and, half distracted, tried to tear down the bills with which, as you have no doubt heard, the town was placarded. A man saw and pursued her. I happened to be returning from a bad case which had detained me all night, and she ran right up against me. There was only one thing to do, and I did it. I knocked the fellow down, and as she had fainted carried her into my surgery. When she was better I walked home with her, and from that time began the mischief which has ended as you know.
“So far as I could gather, the man I knocked down bore malice, and took occasion, when he was less than ordinarily sober, to jeer Mr. Brady about there being an understanding between me and his wife. Mr. Brady forbade me to set foot inside Maryville, and I obeyed him until that night. Do I weary you?”
“No,” Grace answered. “I want to hear all you have to tell me. Some day she may be glad to have a person near her who knows the whole story.”
“The evening before, Scott had been with me. He came in the worse for drink, and talked excitedly of the Glendares and Mr. Brady and his own wrongs. He said when Robert Somerford came to be earl, if he ever did, he would not have an acre to call his own; that it had come home to the Glendares as it would come home to Mr. Brady; and then he went on in a maundering sort of way to speak—forgive my mentioning the matter, but it is connected with that which followed—of what a blessing it was you had never after all taken up, as he styled it, with Mr. Somerford. ‘Ay, it was a good and honest gentleman the first that asked her, if Miss Grace could have fancied him. There never was a Riley, Tories though they are, would have broken his promise, and brought a poor man to beggary, as Th’ Airl has done by me.’
“‘But,’ he went on, ‘Brady did not get Woodbrook from his wife’s cousins, and it’s like, clever as he thinks himself, he won’t have the Castle Farm neither.’
“As the man spoke, it flashed through my mind that it was Mrs. Brady who had revealed her husband’s designs on Woodbrook. I lay awake the whole night thinking about it, and then I understood dimly, but certainly, that when she wished to meet you, it was to tell you of his plans, when she wrote to you it was to entrust you to frustrate them.”
“You are right,” Grace remarked as he stopped for a moment, living, perhaps, the misery of that anxious night over again once more.
“What I suffered thinking about her and her position after that no one can conceive. I knew the man’s nature. I had seen him mentally unclothed, and I was certain all she had endured previously at his hands would be nothing as compared with what would follow if once a suspicion of the truth entered his mind. I felt I must see her once again, and warn her of the danger that menaced. Whatever they might have been before, my feelings then were unselfish. You believe me, Miss Moffat?”
“I do, but pray go on.”
“I knew he intended to go to Dublin the next day, and I saw him take the coach at Kilcurragh, where I made it my business to be. When I returned home, Scott had been round to say Reuben was worse, and so, putting some medicine for the lad in my pocket and Scott’s stick, which he had left in my room the previous evening, in my hand, I started for the Castle Farm, taking Maryville on my way. I did not want any one at the latter place to know of my visit. Mr. Brady had put the last insult on his wife, and—”