uble is."

"Not tell _you!_"

I was amazed. For so long I had known Mary Champion as the stay and
support of my grandparents that I could hardly believe there was
anything they would keep from her.

"They will not tell me," she repeated. "Your grandmother says that it is
Lord St. Leger's will that I am not to be told. It is something they
must endure together. I know it is something about Luke. If they will
not tell me I shall go and ask Garret Dawson why he is frightening them
and with what."

"Grandpapa would never forgive you," I said.

The shadow fell deeper on her face.

"I know he would not," she said. "Must I wait for them to speak, then,
lest I should do harm?"

"I think you must wait for them to speak."

"If it was a mere matter of money"--she wrung her hands together in a
way which in a person of her calm, benignant temperament suggested great
distress--"if it were a mere matter of money, I would sell Castle
Clody--yes, every stick and stone of it. But I think it is more than
money. I shall ask Lord St. Leger to tell me. It is not fair that I, who
ought to have been Luke's wife and their daughter, should be kept in the
dark."

She went away and left me then, and I got up and dressed with a heavy
heart, which all the chorus of the birds and the sweet green of the
trees and grass and the delicious scents and sounds outside could not
charm from its heaviness.

At breakfast, although my godmother did her best, talking about old
friends we had met in Dublin and delivering their messages to Lord and
Lady St. Leger, and although I tried to do my part, the gloom was as
marked as the gloom last night. My grandfather and grandmother sat side
by side at the round table, and now and again they looked at each other
like people who were absorbed in grave anxieties to the exclusion of
what went on about them.

I thought that my grandfather had, all of a sudden, begun to show his
age. He was not so far from eighty, but hitherto he had been hale and
active, so that one would have credited him with many years less. But
now he seemed shaky and tremulous, as my grandmother had been last
night. His blue eyes had a film of trouble over them, as I remembered to
have seen them when I was a child and there was the trouble about Uncle
Luke. I had noticed it then with a childish wonder, although I had
forgotten about it till now.

After breakfast he went out to the garden with my grandmother and walked
up and down with