But Emmeline said nothing. Lady Clara was specially her friend, and she was too anxious to secure such a sister-in-law to make any joke upon such a subject.
On that occasion nothing more was said about it; but Sir Thomas hoped within his heart that his wife was right in prophesying that his son would do nothing sudden in this matter.
On the following morning young Fitzgerald gave the necessary orders at Berryhill very quickly, and then coming back remounted another horse without going into the house. Then he trotted off to Clady, passing the gate of Desmond Court without calling; did what he had promised to do at Clady, or rather that which he had made to stand as an excuse for again visiting that part of the world so quickly; and after that, with a conscience let us hope quite clear, rode up the avenue at Desmond Court. It was still early in the day when he got there, probably not much after two o'clock; and yet Mary had been quite correct in foretelling that he would only be home just in time for dinner.
But, nevertheless, he had not seen Lady Desmond. Why or how it had occurred that she had been absent from the drawing-room the whole of the two hours which he had passed in the house, it may be unnecessary to explain. Such, however, had been the fact. The first five minutes had been passed in inquiries after the bruise, and, it must be owned, in a surgical inspection of the still discoloured arm. "It must be very painful," he had said, looking into her face, as though by doing so he could swear that he would so willingly bear all the pain himself, if it were only possible to make such an exchange.
"Not very," she had answered, smiling. "It is only a little stiff. I can't quite move it easily."
And then she lifted it up, and afterwards dropped it with a little look of pain that ran through his heart.
The next five minutes were taken up in discussing the case of the recusant boiler, and then Clara discovered that she had better go and fetch her mother. But against the immediate taking of this step he had alleged some valid reason, and so they had gone on, till the dark night admonished him that he could do no more than save the dinner hour at Castle Richmond.
The room was nearly dark when he left her, and she got up and stood at the front window, so that, unseen, she might see his figure as he rode off from the house. He mounted his horse within the quadrangle, and coming out at the great old-fashioned ugly portal, galloped off across the green park with a loose rein and a happy heart. What is it the song says?