before, but a
coarse fustian jacket was thrown on the back of a chair, and a clay-pipe
and a paper of tobacco stood on the table. While he was examining these
objects with some attention, a very ragged urchin, of some ten or eleven
years, entered the room with a furtive step, and stood watching him. From
this fellow, all that he could hear was that Miss Betty was gone away,
and that Peter was at the Kilbeggan Market, and though he tried various
questions, no other answers than these were to be obtained. Gorman now
tried to see the drawing-room and the library, but these, as well as the
dining-room, were all locked. He next essayed the bedrooms, but with the
same unsuccess. At length he turned to his own well-known corner--the
well-remembered little 'green-room'--which he loved to think his own. This
too was locked, but Gorman remembered that by pressing the door underneath
with his walking-stick, he could lift the bolt from the old-fashioned
receptacle that held it, and open the door. Curious to have a last look at
a spot dear by so many memories, he tried the old artifice and succeeded.

He had still on his watch-chain the little key of an old marquetrie
cabinet, where he was wont to write, and now he was determined to write a
last letter to his aunt from the old spot, and send her his good-bye from
the very corner where he had often come to wish her 'good-night.'

He opened the window and walked out on the little wooden balcony, from
which the view extended over the lawn and the broad belt of wood that
fenced the demesne. The Sliebh Bloom Mountain shone in the distance, and
in the calm of an evening sunlight the whole picture had something in its
silence and peacefulness of almost rapturous charm.

Who is there amongst us that has not felt, in walking through the rooms of
some uninhabited house, with every appliance of human comfort strewn about,
ease and luxury within, wavy trees and sloping lawn or eddying waters
without--who, in seeing all these, has not questioned himself as to why
this should be deserted? and why is there none to taste and feel all the
blessedness of such a lot as life here should offer? Is not the world full
of these places? is not the puzzle of this query of all lands and of all
peoples? That ever-present delusion of what we should do--what be if we
were aught other than ourselves: how happy, how contented, how unrepining,
and how good--ay, even our moral nature comes into the compact--this
de