“No card?”
“Sorra a wan.”
“Who handed you the portmanteau?”
“Sorra a know I know.”
A thought now flashed across my brain: Fribscombe! He was not the man to lose a chance of talking to a pretty woman. He would have told her who I was, and it was through him that she had communicated. How asinine not to have thought of this before!
Chartering a jarvey, I started across the country to the family mansion of the Fribscombes, accompanied by the two portmanteaus.
“I never opened my lips to her. She dried up after you left, and pulled down the shutters.” This gave me a pang of the keenest delight. “I got out at Killoughter, the next station, and she went on.”
On my return to Dublin I caused advertisements to be inserted in several of the leading Irish papers; I also tried the second column of the Times and the Glasgow Herald, but, alas! with no effect.
Six months had glided away, during which she made no sign. The portmanteau maintained possession of a corner of my solitary apartment, and the image of its whilome proprietor defiantly held more than one corner of my heart; indeed, I may as well candidly confess that it was strongly entrenched in all four.
The summer assizes were over, and the briefless ones flitted hither and thither for the long vacation: some to Switzerland, with Mont Blanc in the distance—very much in the distance—others the passes of the Tyrol, sunny Spain, byways in Brittany, or the Highlands of Scotland. Connemara found its true believers, and Killarney its pious pilgrims. As for myself, I was perforce compelled to substitute the Dodder for the Rhine, the Dublin mountains for the Alps, and Sackville Street for the Boulevard des Italiens. My aunt had contributed the ten-pound note upon which I had hung in fond anticipation towards the building of Father Donnelly’s new church at Shinanshone, and the letter which conveyed this intelligence concluded with the following: “I don’t see your name figuring in any of the trials, good, bad, or indifferent. It’s all Macdonogh and Armstrong. What are you about, at all at all? At this rate of going you’ll never see a silk gown, let alone the bench. You might as well be on the Hill of Howth as in the Four Courts, if you don’t stir yourself. Let me see you cheek by jowl with Macdonogh and Armstrong during the coming winter, or I’ll know the reason why, and make my financial arrangements accordingly.”