"You never did him any," the mother said.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her where Nora Brady was, for that was a trouble to me, too, despite my happiness. The poor people round about had, I was told, taken the same view of poor Nora's devotion to her sick man as Maureen. She had slipped away from those who, like myself, would have stood her friends. But before I could ask the question Richard Dawson himself came into the room.
I was startled and a little embarrassed at first sight of him. I had had no idea that he was at Damerstown. And his face was sadly marked and pitted with the small-pox.
"Miss Devereux, you must forgive my presenting myself before you with this hideous face, but there are some things I want to tell you. There, don't look at me! Take this."
He picked up a Japanese fan and handed it to me and the action hurt me. I compelled myself to look at him without flinching.
"You are not at all hideous," I said. "No one who cared for you would think you hideous."
"Why, no," he said. "My mother looks at me as though I had the skin of a young child--and there is another---- Miss Bawn, I wish you happiness. I am very glad the better man has won."
While we talked Mrs. Dawson got up and left us. She was one of those people who are always forgetting things and going in search of them, so the action had no special significance.
"You are very generous," I said. And then I asked him the question which was in my mind. "Mr. Dawson," I said, "can you tell me where Nora is? I want to write to her, to bring her back."
"I know," he answered, "but she will not come back yet awhile. She has, by her own wish and desire, gone to school, to a convent. She had schooling enough for me, God knows, in her tender and faithful heart; but she is as obstinate as any creature ever was when she thinks a thing is right. So I have to wait, very much against my will, while the nuns make a lady of Nora. It is her own phrase. I have assured her that she is a better lady than most ladies I have known, and that I am not a gentleman. But she would banish me and try my patience."
"Meaning--that she will marry me when she has acquired the thing she desires. Meaning--I would have married her, Bawn, without love, because they blackened her, the innocent soul, for her mercy to me. But I have learned to love her. She holds my heart against all women. I am not hideous to her."
