The old minister despatched his two notes very speedily, and, with profuse assurances of his “highest consideration,” he took leave of the lawyer, and sat down to ruminate over their late conversation, and the step he had just taken. Mr. M’Kinlay, too, meditated as he drove homewards, but not with all that clearness of intellect he could usually bestow upon a knotty point. Like most men in his predicament, to be puzzled was to be angered, and so did he inveigh to himself against “that crotchety old humbug, with his mare’s nest of a secret marriage.” Not but there was-a “something somewhere,” which he, M’Kinlay, would certainly investigate before he was many weeks older. “Miss Georgina’s manner to me used to undergo very strange vacillations--very strange ones indeed. Yes, there was something ‘in it’--surely something.” While Kate O’Hara was still sleeping the next morning, Ada hurried into her room, and threw her arms around her, sobbing bitterly, as the hot tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh, Kate, my own dear, darling Kate, what is this dreadful thing I have just heard? Lisette has just told me that she is not to pack your clothes--that you are not coming with me abroad.” Kate raised herself on one arm, and pushed back her hair from her brow, her large eyes wearing for an instant the meaningless look of one suddenly awakened from sleep. “Do you hear me--do you know what I am saying, dearest?” asked Ada, as she kissed her, and drew her towards her. “Tell it me again,” said she, in a low, distinct voice. “Lisette says that Mademoiselle has orders--from whom I cannot say--that you are to remain in England, to go to a school, or to live with a governess, or to return to Ireland, or something; but whatever it is, that we are to be separated.” And again her grief burst forth and choked her words. “I knew this would come one day,” said Kate, slowly, but without any touch of emotion. “It was a caprice that took me, and it is a caprice that deserts me.” “Oh, don’t say that, Kate, of my own dear papa, who loves you almost as he loves me!” “I can have nothing but words of gratitude for him, Ada, and for your mother.” “You mean, then----” “No matter what I mean, my sweet Ada. It may be, after all, a mercy. Who is to say whether, after another year of this sort of life, its delicious happiness should have so grown into my nature that it would tear my very heart-strings to free myself from its coils? Even now, there were days when I forgot I was a peasant girl, without home, or friends, or fortune.” “Oh, Kate, you will break my heart if you speak this way!” “Well, then, to talk more cheerfully. Will not that pretty hat yonder, with the long blue feather, look wondrous picturesque, as I follow the goats up the steep sides of Inchegora? and will not that gauzy scarf be a rare muffle as I gather the seaweed below the cliffs of Bengore?”