He emptied drawer after drawer, burning, as Vyner had bade him, rolls of letters, parliamentary papers, and such-like, till, in tossing over heaps of rubbish, he came upon a piece of stout card-board, and on turning it about saw the sketch Vyner had made of the Irish peasant child in Donegal. Who was it so like? Surely he knew that expression, the peculiar look of the eyes, sad and thoughtful, and yet defiant? He went over in his mind one after another of those town-bred beauties he had met in the season, when, suddenly, he exclaimed, “What a fool I have been all this time. It is the girl at Dalradern, the ‘ward,’”--here he laughed in derision--“the ‘ward’ of Sir Within Wardle. Ay, and she knew _me_, too, I could swear. All her evasive answers about Ireland show it.” He turned hastily to Vyner’s letter, and surmised that it was to this very point he was coming, when the news of young Luttrell’s death was brought him. “What can be her position now, and how came she beneath that old man’s roof? With what craft and what boldness she played her game! The girl who has head enough for that, has cleverness to know that I am not a man to be despised. She should have made me her friend at once. Who could counsel her so well, or tell her the shoals and quicksands before her? She ought to have done this, and she shall, too. I will go over to-morrow to Dalradern; I will take her this sketch; we shall see if it will not be a bond of friendship between us.” When, true to the pledge he had made with himself, he went oyer to Dalradern the next morning, it was to discover that Sir Within and his ward had taken their departure two hours before. The servants were busily engaged in dismantling the rooms, and preparing to close the Castle against all visitors. To his inquiries, ingenious enough, he could get no satisfactory answer as to the direction they had gone, or to what time their absence might be protracted, and Grenfell, disappointed and baffled, returned to the Cottage to pass his last evening, ere he quitted it for ever. CHAPTER XLII. THE SANDS AT SUNSET Towards the close of a day in the late autumn, when the declining sun was throwing a long column of golden light over the sea, a little group was gathered on the shore at Ostend, the last, it seemed, of all the summer visitors who had repaired there for the season. The group consisted of a young girl, whose attitude, as she lay reclined in a bath-chair, bespoke extreme debility, and an old man who stood at her side, directing her attention, as his gestures indicated, to different objects in the landscape. [Illustration: 365] Two servants in livery, and a somewhat demurely-dressed maid, stood at a little distance off, in deferential attendance on the others.