heard of you."

"From you?"

"No;--not first from me. There are many reasons why I would not have
mentioned your names could I have helped it. He has wished me to marry
another girl,--and especially a Protestant girl. That was impossible."

"That must be impossible now, Fred," said Kate, looking up into his
face.

"Quite so, dearest; but why should I have vexed him, seeing that he is
so good to me, and that he must be gone so soon?"

"Who had told him of us?" asked Mrs. O'Hara.

"That woman down there at Castle Quin."

"Lady Mary?"

"Foul-tongued old maid that she is," exclaimed Fred. "She writes to my
aunt by every post, I believe."

"What evil can she say of us?"

"She does say evil. Never mind what. Such a woman always says evil of
those of her sex who are good-looking."

"There, mother;--that's for you," said Kate, laughing. "I don't care
what she says."

"If she tells your aunt that we live in a small cottage, without
servants, without society, with just the bare necessaries of life, she
tells the truth of us."

"That's just what she does say;--and she goes on harping about
religion. Never mind her. You can understand that my uncle should be
old-fashioned. He is very old, and we must wait."

"Waiting is so weary," said Mrs. O'Hara.

"It is not weary for me at all," said Kate.

Then he left them, without having said a word about the Captain. He
found the Captain to be a subject very uncomfortable to mention, and
thought as he was sitting there that it might perhaps be better to make
his first enquiries of this priest. No one said a word to him about the
Captain beyond what he had heard from his boatman. For, as it happened,
he did not see the priest till May was nearly past, and during all that
time things were going from bad to worse. As regarded any services which
he rendered to the army at this period of his career, the excuses which
he had made to his uncle were certainly not valid. Some pretence at
positively necessary routine duties it must be supposed that he made;
but he spent more of his time either on the sea, or among the cliffs
with Kate, or on the road going backwards and forwards, than he did at
his quarters. It was known that he was to leave the regiment and become
a great man at home in October, and his brother officers were kind to
him. And it was known also, of course, that there was a young lady down
on the sea coast beyond Ennistimon, and doubtless there were jokes on
the s