‘Shall I make you a confession, Dick? I envy you all that! I envy you what smacks of a race, a name, an ancestry, a lineage. It’s a great thing to be able to “take up the running,” as folks say, instead of making all the race yourself; and there’s one inestimable advantage in it, it rescues you from all indecent haste about asserting your station. You feel yourself to be a somebody and you’ve not hurried to proclaim it. There now, my boy, if you’d have said only half as much as that on the score of your family, I’d have called you an arrant snob. So much for consistency.’ ‘What you have said gave me pleasure, I’ll own that.’ ‘I suppose it was you planted those trees there. It was a nice thought, and makes the transition from the bleak bog to the cultivated land more easy and graceful. Now I see the castle well. It’s a fine portly mass against the morning sky, and I perceive you fly a flag over it.’ ‘When the lord is at home.’ ‘Ay, and by the way, do you give him his title while talking to him here?’ ‘The tenants do, and the neighbours and strangers do as they please about it.’ ‘Does he like it himself?’ ‘If I was to guess, I should perhaps say he does like it. Here we are now. Inside this low gate you are within the demesne, and I may bid you welcome to Kilgobbin. We shall build a lodge here one of these days. There’s a good stretch, however, yet to the castle. We call it two miles, and it’s not far short of it.’ ‘What a glorious morning. There is an ecstasy in scenting these nice fresh woods in the clear sunrise, and seeing those modest daffodils make their morning toilet.’ ‘That’s a fancy of Kate’s. There is a border of such wild flowers all the way to the house.’ ‘And those rills of clear water that flank the road, are they of her designing?’ ‘That they are. There was a cutting made for a railroad line about four miles from this, and they came upon a sort of pudding-stone formation, made up chiefly of white pebbles. Kate heard of it, purchased the whole mass, and had these channels paved with them from the gate to the castle, and that’s the reason this water has its crystal clearness.’ ‘She’s worthy of Shakespeare’s sweet epithet, the “daintiest Kate in Christendom.” Here’s her health!’ and he stooped down, and filling his palm with the running water, drank it off. ‘I see it’s not yet five o’clock. We’ll steal quietly off to bed, and have three or four hours sleep before we show ourselves.’ CHAPTER XIII A SICK-ROOM