continued, men do become more weary than women.
But Edith thought there would be something in the constancy of
Rachel's love to cheer her brother, and therefore the letter made
her contented if not happy.

For herself, she said to herself no love could cheer her. Captain
Clayton still hung about Tuam and Headford, but his presence in the
neighbourhood was always to be attributed to the evidence of which he
was in search as to Florian's death. It seemed now with him that the
one great object of his heart was the unravelling of that murder. "It
was no mystery," as he said over and over again in Edith's hearing.
He knew very well who had fired the rifle. He could see, in his
mind's eye, the slight form of the crouching wretch as he too surely
took his aim from the temporary barricade. The passion had become so
strong with him of bringing the man to justice that he almost felt,
that between him and his God he could swear to having seen it. And
yet he knew that it was not so. To have the hanging of that man would
be to him a privilege only next to that of possessing Edith Jones.
And he was a sanguine man, and did believe that in process of time
both privileges would be vouchsafed to him.

But Edith was less sanguine. She could not admit to herself the
possibility that there should be successful love between her and
her hero. His presence there in the neighbourhood of her home was
stained by constant references to her brother's blood. And then,
though there was no chance for Ada, Ada's former hopes militated
altogether against Edith. "He had better go away and just leave us to
ourselves," she said to herself. But yet neither was she nor was Ada
sunk so low in heart as her father and her brother.

"Frank," she said to her brother, "whom do you think this letter is
from?" and she held up in her hand Rachel's epistle.

"I care not at all, unless it be from that most improbable of all
creatures, a tenant coming to pay his rent."

"Nothing quite so beautiful as that."

"Or from someone who has evidence to give about some of these murders
that are going on?"--A Mr. Morris from the other side of the lake,
in County Mayo, had just been killed, and the minds of men were now
disturbed with this new horror.--"Anybody can kill anybody who has a
taste in that direction. What a country for a man with his family to
pitch upon and live in! And that all this should have been kept under
so long by policemen and right-thinking individual