Notwithstanding Mrs. Nicholson’s entreaties, Grace made no longer stay in Dublin than it was possible to avoid. She longed to be in the north. It seemed to her she was needed there, and Mr. Nicholson, having been so fortunate as to find an acquaintance who was proceeding as far as Kilcurragh, put the heiress in his charge, and, it may as well be confessed with some misgivings as to how Grace would comport herself in so critical a position, saw her off.
“If you want my help,” he said, and he felt quite certain she would, “I will come at an hour’s notice.”
Very gratefully she gave him her hand, and thanked him with one of her rare and wonderful smiles.
“A woman, if she had been portionless, to have driven a man to distraction,” considered Mr. Nicholson, and he was right. An heiress is never so truly a woman as other women. Gold clothes her as with a garment, and it is a somewhat stiff robe in which to take her walks abroad.
Decidedly Grace would have been a more charming, even though a much less useful woman, had her face alone been her fortune.
As matters stood, however, she made friends so successfully with the elderly gentleman who was her travelling companion, that by the time they arrived at their journey’s end, he was sufficiently interested in Amos Scott to assist her in finding his solicitor, who chanced to be a gentleman famous for making the best of bad cases—for getting off notorious vagabonds, for taking advantage of legal quibbles, and saving men’s money and lives by the splitting of a legal straw.
“We are all friends here, I suppose,” he said looking doubtfully at Grace’s companion, whilst he stripped the feathers off a pen. “I may speak confidentially?”
“Most decidedly,” Grace answered.
“I can do nothing for him,” he remarked. “He will not trust me.”
“How do you mean?” she asked.