Very slowly the days pass at Donaghmore; a detachment of the constabulary keeps strict guard over the old house, the master of which lies sick unto death.

It seems as if the old man’s life is fading with the year.  The shot that entered his arm shattered the bone immediately below the elbow, and, the wound not healing, this, together with the shock and excitement of that night’s work, is telling on him.

Honor goes about like a ghost; she looks pitifully changed; but there is only faithful old Aileen to be troubled by her looks.  Launce has gone back to Dublin and Horace has joined his regiment at Aldershot.

One care has been lifted off the girl’s heart; Power Magill is no longer a prisoner.

The first thing that Honor heard on her return from Scanlan’s cottage was that Power Magill and two others had got away, having given their guards the slip on the mountain road between Glen Doyle and Drum.

The body of the man who was shot on the moss that terrible night has been taken to Dublin by his friends, to be buried among his own people; and, if he was Kate Dundas’s lover, as Launce in his jealous rage declared, the widow has certainly taken his loss very coolly.

But there is one thing that she is not taking quite so coolly, and that is the desertion of her admirers.  Rose Mount is no longer the center of attraction to the neighborhood its pretty drawing-room is deserted.  Men do not care to visit at a house about which such ugly reports are circulated.  They even fight shy of its beautiful mistress in public, and this is perhaps the cruelest form which punishment could assume for such a woman as Mrs. Dundas.  She knows nothing of friendship and very little of love, but her desire for admiration is boundless, and her chance of that in Drum or Donaghmore is at an end forever.

November has set in cold and stormy.  It seems to Honor, nervous and anxious as she is, that the wind never ceases day or night, and sometimes its shrill moans make her feel as if she were going mad.

Her father is able to come down-stairs now, but he misses the boys, and complains fretfully of the loneliness of the house.

One day Honor walks over to the rectory to see Belle Delorme.  Belle is in the drawing-room reading a yellow-bound novel, which she slips dexterously out of sight at the sound of her visitor’s voice.

Belle is not quite so piquant and dashing as she used to be, perhaps; but if she has been fretting for Launce as Honor thinks she has certainly lost none of her good looks in the process.

She looks up now with a smile as Honor enters.

“I was just going over to tell you the news, dear.  I know you never hear anything at Donaghmore.”

“The news!” Honor falters, turning from white to crimson; her first thought being of some new danger threatening Power Magill.

“Oh, it’s nothing very wonderful perhaps nothing that you will call news after all!” Belle says hurriedly, seeing that swift blush and understanding it.  “It is just that Ross Mount is closed, and its mistress has flown away to England.  Sure they are saying now that she has a husband over there, alive and well, a farmer somewhere in Devonshire.  Maybe she has gone back to him.”

“Maybe she has,” Honor assents coldly.

“And they are saying too,” Belle goes on more gravely, and looking anxiously at her friend, “that the two men who were with Power Magill have got off to America.  I’m sure I hope it is true!”

Honor says not a word.  She is thinking of the man who is left a homeless wanderer on his native mountains an exile within sight of his own walls!

“It’s an awful pity about poor Power, isn’t it, Honor?  Sometimes I cry my eyes red thinking of him,” Belle goes on in her pretty plaintive voice; “and I often think he must have gone with the rest to Donaghmore to keep them in order.  He couldn’t have gone, you know, to to do any harm!”

Honor looks at her gratefully, and the words linger in her mind and comfort her in some vague way during her long and lonely walk to Donaghmore.

The sun has set as she enters the gates, and a mist which has crept up from the river makes the wide empty space on her left, as she walks up toward the house, look more like a lake than solid earth.

She has left the ruins behind her, not without a nervous shiver in passing, when the sound of a step, falling lightly but regularly on the strip of grass by the side of the drive, arrests her attention and sets her heart beating rapidly.

“It is all my own foolish fancy,” she says to herself, and walks faster.

The step follows faster too.  She stops, and instantly that light footfall is silent.  Not a creature is to be seen.  The old ruins rise grim and bare between her and the pale evening sky, but not a sound comes from them.

“It must have been my own fancy,” she tells herself, and, reassured, starts forward almost at a run.

But listen!  Again the step sounds behind her; more distant and far less rapid than her own, but clear and unmistakable.  Her heart gives a great throb, the color dies out of her cheeks, and by the time she reaches her own door she feels ready to fall from haste and fear.

The old butler is crossing the hall and he looks at her curiously.

“Have you seen anything to startle you, Miss Honor?” he says at last.

“No; I have seen nothing.  Why do you ask?” Not for worlds would she own to any one the ghostly fears that shook her out there in the dusky avenue, with the sound of those following steps in her ears.

“Well,” adds the butler, “one of the girls has just come in, miss, in a state of great fright, and says that she saw the old abbot himself at the corner of the avenue, watching the house for all the world as if it held some treasure of his own.”

“Nonsense!” Honor says, turning suddenly pale, even in the lighted hall.  “I hope these silly tales are not going to begin again.  Your master will be very displeased if they come to his ears.”

As she enters the sitting-room she sees that her father is not alone.

A tall man is standing on the rug before the fire, talking with much animation.  It is Brian Beresford.

“I have taken the liberty of invading you without even an invitation,” he says, coming forward with outstretched hand.

“And you are welcome,” the girl answers softly.  “Besides, your last invasion was so well timed, we may well forgive this one.”

“Ah,” he says, smiling gravely, “that was a rough sort of invasion!  I hope I shall never have to attack Donaghmore in that fashion again.”

“I hope not indeed!” Honor agrees promptly.  “I don’t think I could live through another night like that.”

“Oh, yes, you could through a dozen such, if necessary.  I quite admired your bravery.  I never saw a young lady so cool under fire before.”

She blushes as she listens; her heart thrills with a half-reluctant pride at his praise.

“What has come to me,” she says to herself crossly, “that I can’t look at the man without blushing?  It’s time I had more sense.”

“I have come to stay a day or two,” he tells them.

A week passes, however, and he does not go away.  To Honor it is a week of very mixed sensations.  She has never before known any one like this stolid Englishman, who under all his composure hides a passion so fiery, a will so strong.

On his part he is very grave and gentle.  Not once does a word of love pass his lips; and she is glad of it, for she is in no mood to think of love or lovers.

“It would be horrible to think of such things,” she tells herself, “while poor Power Magill is wandering in homeless misery.”

She is thinking of him to-night as she looks out at the moonlight, lying chill and white on the grass and the bare flower-beds.

“Where is he now?” she asks herself with a shivering sigh, as she listens to the restless creak and sough of the trees.  It is a question she is asking continually; but who can answer it?

He may be lying dead on some bare hillside, or at the bottom of some dark gorge in the mountains.

From the drawing-room window she can see across to the drive.  Some one is coming slowly toward the house a girl, little more than a child, with an old cloak flung over her head country fashion.  Honor watches her, and wonders which of the village people have been brave enough to pass the ruins of Donaghmore at this hour.

The girl comes straight on to the window at which Honor is still standing.  When she is quite close she opens her cloak and holds out a letter not a bulky letter, a mere scrap, closely twisted; and, without a second thought, Honor raises the window and takes it out of her hand.

“Who has sent it, Nora?” for she recognizes the child now that she sees her face.

But Nora only shakes her head and hurries away, passing over the moonlit grass like the mere shadow of a girl.

The gentlemen are stirring in the dining-room now; she can hear their chairs being set back, and her father’s voice as he opens the door for their guest.

There is not a moment to be lost if she is to read her letter in secret, and instinctively she feels that it is meant for no eyes but her own.  Untwisting it rapidly, she spreads it out and reads: 

“Will you venture to the old ruins at dusk to-morrow, to see one who needs your forgiveness, even if you must refuse him your pity?  P. M.”

As she reads the tears rush into her eyes, half blinding her; the sorrowful pleading words grow dim and indistinct.

“How he must have suffered,” she says to herself, “to have changed like this!” Masterful Power, who used always to take obedience for granted!  There is something pitiful in it that goes straight to the tender woman’s heart, loyal to its old traditions.

As she was putting the paper into the bosom of her dress, the drawing-room door opens, and Brian Beresford enters, followed by her father.  Brian’s eyes at once seek her where she stands beside the open window, her fingers playing nervously with the tell-tale scrap of paper.

His face darkens at once, and she knows that he has seen and understood.