old to be on an equality with
him,--on such an equality in point of age as men and women feel when
they learn to love each other; and therefore it had not occurred to
her that he could regard her daughter as other than a child. To Lady
Desmond, Clara was a child; how then could she be more to him? And
yet now it was too plain that he had looked on Clara as a woman. In
what light then must he have thought of that woman's mother? And so,
with saddened heart, but subdued anger, she continued to gaze through
the window till all without was dusk and dark.

There can be to a woman no remembrance of age so strong as that of
seeing a daughter go forth to the world a married woman. If that does
not tell the mother that the time of her own youth has passed away,
nothing will ever bring the tale home. It had not quite come to this
with Lady Desmond;--Clara was not going forth to the world as a
married woman. But here was one now who had judged her as fit to
be so taken; and this one was the very man of all others in whose
estimation Lady Desmond would have wished to drop a few of the years
that encumbered her.

She was not, however, a weak woman, and so she performed her task.
She had candles brought to her, and sitting down, she wrote a note to
Owen Fitzgerald, saying that she herself would call at Hap House at
an hour named on the following day.

She had written three or four letters before she had made up her mind
exactly as to the one she would send. At first she had desired him
to come to her there at Desmond Court; but then she thought of the
danger there might be of Clara seeing him;--of the danger, also, of
her own feelings towards him when he should be there with her, in her
own house, in the accustomed way. And she tried to say by letter all
that it behoved her to say, so that there need be no meeting. But in
this she failed. One letter was stern and arrogant, and the next was
soft-hearted, so that it might teach him to think that his love for
Clara might yet be successful. At last she resolved to go herself to
Hap House; and accordingly she wrote her letter and despatched it.

Fitzgerald was of course aware of the subject of the threatened
visit. When he determined to make his proposal to Clara, the matter
did not seem to him to be one in which all chances of success were
desperate. If, he thought, he could induce the girl to love him,
other smaller difficulties might be made to vanish from his path.
He had now in