"Class;—what class? He is a gentleman, I presume, and she is a lady."

"That is very true;—so true that I myself shall act upon the truth. But I will not make his last years wretched. He is a Protestant, and you are Catholics."

"What is that? Are not ever so many of your lords Catholics? Were they not all Catholics before Protestants were ever thought of?"

"Mrs. O'Hara, I have told you that to me she is as high and good and noble as though she were a Princess. And I have told you that she shall be my wife. If that does not content you, I cannot help it. It contents her. I owe much to her."

"Indeed you do;—everything."

"But I owe much to him also. I do not think that you can gain anything by quarrelling with me."

She paused for a while before she answered him, looking into his face the while with something of the ferocity of a tigress. So intent was her gaze that his eyes quailed beneath it. "By the living God," she said, "if you injure my child I will have the very blood from your heart."

Nevertheless she allowed him to return alone to the house, where she knew that he would find her girl. "Kate," he said, going into the parlour in which she was sitting idle at the window,—"dear Kate."

"Well, sir?"

"I'm off."

"You are always—off, as you call it."

"Well,—yes. But I'm not on and off, as the saying is."

"Why should you go away now?"

"Do you suppose a soldier has got nothing to do? You never calculate, I think, that Ennis is about three-and-twenty miles from here. Come, Kate, be nice with me before I go."

"How can I be nice when you are going? I always think when I see you go that you will never come back to me again. I don't know why you should come back to such a place as this?"

"Because, as it happens, the place holds what I love best in all the world." Then he lifted her from her chair, and put his arm round her waist. "Do you not know that I love you better than all that the world holds?"

"How can I know it?"

"Because I swear it to you."

"I think that you like me—a little. Oh, Fred, if you were to go and never to come back I should die. Do you remember Mariana? 'My life is dreary. He cometh 'not,' she said. She said, 'I am aweary, 'aweary; I would that I were dead!' Do you remember that? What has mother been saying to you?"

"She has been bidding me to do you no harm. It was not necessary. I would sooner pluck out my eye than hurt you. My uncle is an old man,—a very old man. She cannot understand that it is better that we should wait, than that I should have to think hereafter that I had killed him by my unkindness."