When an hour afterwards she returned to claim the table-cloth, Miss Moffat had vanished.
Over the fields she was gone to visit Mrs. Scott. Now making her way across a meadow where, as is the Irish fashion, the hay had been gathered into about twenty small stacks, hay ropes binding the grass together; now treading lightly between potatoe rigs, now skirting a field of oats or barley, she came at length by a different route to any she had heretofore traversed to the homestead of the Castle Farm.
Straight into the kitchen Grace walked. Upstairs she heard the sound of movement and voices, and upstairs after knocking vainly on the dresser she proceeded.
A stifled shriek was the first sound which greeted her, the next was,—
“Miss Grace, go down again into the open air. And may God Himself preserve you from all evil. We have got the faver.”
Sound of dread in Ireland! If there be a cowardly spot in the nature of Irish men and women even at the present day, it is their blind, unreasoning dread of infection.
Reared amongst those who held this horror, Grace at sound of Mrs. Scott’s news involuntarily drew back. Next instant she stood by Reuben’s bedside.
The lad was dying. Even her inexperience grasped that; and falling on her knees and burying her face in the coverlet, she wept tears she had been longing to shed ever since she entered Maryville.
“Miss Grace,” it was the mother who spoke and touched her, “ye can’t save him. Why should ye kill yourself?”
“And you?” asked Grace, looking at mother and friend.