urning his head. The car drove on,
and soon Mike stood within his dismantled home. There had been some
delay in procuring wood for the new rafters and the poor roofless,
smoked-begrimed walls looked very forlorn. Mike glanced round him and
groaned aloud; he could have wept, so great was the turmoil in his
heart and in his mind. Everything was changed, it seemed to him;
everything was gone. Could this poor little place ever be home again?
How silent it was now that the old father was not cracking his jokes
in the corner! How empty now that the mother's spare form was absent!
They were safe and sound at Monavoe, he knew, "well looked after," as
the driver had told him, by "Miss Rorke" herself, but for the time
being it almost seemed to him as though they were dead. As for Roseen,
she was Miss Rorke now, the Mistress, the owner of Monavoe--_his_
Roseen was gone too!

His heart was still sore at the recollection of his bitter
disappointment on the fateful evening when the rick was burnt. She had
not come to meet him on that night of all nights in the year! He knew,
through Jack McEvoy, that she had promised her grandfather never to
speak to him again. She had broken faith with him. All through these
weary weeks in prison, the anguish of this thought had deadened all
his other sufferings and anxieties, but in any case, how could he ever
expect her, amid her new grandeurs, to think of him as she used to do?
She had the best heart in the world, he knew that, and wouldn't ask to
do anything that was not kind; she'd try to make up as well as she
could for the "differ of things" by doing all in her power for his
father and mother and by befriending him. It had been mainly through
her exertions that he had been released, and she had sent her own car
to meet him--oh, to be sure she had done that! But as to consenting to
be his sweetheart again, sure, goodness knew, Michael could never
expect that.

"Afther me bein' in prison an' all!" he said to himself mournfully. "I
had a right to be givin' up thinkin' of her altogether."

He left the cabin presently and climbed the hill, entering the ruins
and seating himself on the great stone slab on one side of the
banqueting-hall. By-and-by, he would have to go to Monavoe to see his
parents, but he would wait for a little while first; he shrank from
the meeting with Roseen. He intended to convey to her straightway his
sense of the distance between them, and his determination to take no
a