it, clearing the high leap with a tremendous spring, and
alighting on the trimly kept grass-plat before the door.

A slight faint shriek was heard as the horse dashed past the window,
and, pale with terror, Mary Leicester stood in the porch.

Cashel had meanwhile dismounted, and given his horse to the old
gardener.

"Not hurt, Mr. Cashel?" said she, trying to seem composed, while she
trembled in every limb.

"Not in the least. I never intended to have alarmed you, however."

"Then it was no runaway?" said she, essaying a smile.

"I 'm ashamed to say I have not that excuse for so rudely trampling over
your neat sward. Will Mr. Corrigan forgive me?"

"Of course he will, if he even ever knows that he has anything to
forgive; but it so happens that he has gone into the village to-day,--an
excursion he has not made for nigh a year. He wished to consult our
friend the doctor on some matter of importance, and I half suspect he
may have stayed to share his dinner."

As Miss Leicester continued to make this explanation, they had reached
the drawing-room, which, to Cashel's amazement, exhibited tokens of
intended departure. Patches here and there on the walls showed where
pictures had stood. The bookshelves were empty, the tables displayed
none of those little trifling objects which denote daily life and its
occupations, and his eye wandered over the sad-looking scene till it
came back to her, as she stood reading his glances, and seeming to
re-echo the sentiment they conveyed. "All this would seem to speak of
leave-taking," said Cashel, in a voice that agitation made thick and
guttural.

"It is so," said she, with a sigh; "we are going away."

"Going away!" Simple as the words are, we have no sadder sounds in our
language; they have the sorrowful cadence that bespeaks desertion; they
ring through the heart like a knell over long-past happiness; they are
the requiem over "friends no more," and of times that never can come
back again.

"Going away!" How dreary does it sound,--as if life had no fixed
destination in future, but that we were to drift over its bleak ocean,
the "waifs" of what we once had been!

"Going away!" cried Cashel. "But surely you have not heard--" He stopped
himself; another word, and his secret had been revealed,--the secret he
had so imperatively enjoined Tiernay to keep; for it was his intention
to have left Ireland forever ere Mr. Corrigan should have learned the
debt of gratitude he owed h