little
clouded.'

'I have seen his mother once or twice,' Bryda said. 'She showed me his
first letter, written in high spirits.'

'Ah, yes! and there have been others since, but they don't deceive
George Catcott, who is always thinking of him, having the notion that
there never was a poet like him since Shakespeare. He is making a
mistake now in rushing into politics in the _Middlesex Journal_. He
sends Catcott the papers. What will Lord Hillsborough or the Lord Mayor
care for all his violent reproaches anent this affair at Boston? Not a
brass farthing--not they! That's a fine letter to the freeholders of
Bristol, I own, in which he chronicles the speech of his glorious
Canynge, when he said, "dear as his family were, his country was
dearer," or something like that. It is all very fine, but Chatterton has
to earn his bread, and I don't think he is going the right way to do it.
He seems proud of his intimacy with the editor of the _Political
Register_, but I fear it won't do him much good.'

'He still writes poetry, sir,' Bryda said, 'so his sister tells me,' and
she added, with enthusiasm, 'his poetry is beautiful!'

'Yes, yes, you know, I take it, many folks think there never was such a
person as "Rowley the priest."'

'_Never!_' Bryda exclaimed, 'not all those hundreds of years ago.'

Mr Barrett smiled.

'Rowley the priest is one and the same with Thomas Chatterton, so some
say--not good George Catcott and not Mr Clayfield. I am in no position
to decide the question.'

Mr Barrett talked on, discussing Chatterton and his work, and Bryda grew
interested in spite of herself, and was almost surprised when the white
gates of Rock House came in sight, and the dreaded moment of the
interview was close at hand.

How well she recalled her first and only visit there, more than a year
before, the courage that then emboldened her to plead her grandfather's
cause, the despair with which she turned away and ran down the avenue of
firs, with Flick by her side, and had to confess to herself that her
errand was in vain. Then arose those questionings which torture us all
when we look back on the irrevocable, and she asked herself,--

'_If_ I had never come here that day, _if_ I had never tried to move his
hard heart to pity, all this misery and distress might--_would_ have
been saved. Oh! why did I ever come, why did I ever do it?'

These and other thoughts of the same kind filled Bryda's mind as she
waited in a dull room