She sat down on an old chair, and looked back upon her life since last she touched its worm-eaten woodwork. A life lulled sometimes to a half forgetfulness, which was nearer to positive happiness than she ever expected to attain. The reflection returned again and again to her, that what had been done was my lord's fault, not hers--that she had acquiesced as the weaker vessel, and had washed her hands of the consequences. But then, several times, her peace had been rudely broken by vague terror of troubles renewed. Would she be able to avert them? Would her puny woman's arm be strong enough to grapple with Fate? Events certainly looked threatening. Terence had involved himself in a forlorn hope. What if he should fall? My lady rose hastily, and flinging wide the window, panted there for breath. She realised, with a tingling horror of abasement, that if he fell, her own burthen would be lightened--that far away, muffled in her inmost soul, there was a voice babbling a hint that it would be a mercy if he fell. Her own son! It was a mother's inner voice that spoke! She pressed her face helplessly upon the tattered curtain, as she had used to do when imploring a release, and groaned aloud--it was well that the others had not yet arrived. Then, her mental vision sharpened by this pang, she wandered on, oblivious of the stories murmured by the tables and the chairs--for she was peering with all her might into the future now. Things were going crooked. There could be no denying that. She had schemed for the best. What would come of her scheming? Shane was deplorably difficult to manage--looked so like his father sometimes when angered, that she recoiled as she remembered the expression of his visage when she moaned over her fate to him upon this very spot all those years ago. He grew daily more difficult to manage, did Shane; because he was a Cherokee, a Hellfire; and it stands to reason that an important attribute for a Hellfire to cultivate must be a scorn of maternal lecturing and fiddlefaddle. Lady Glandore (taught by a rough apprenticeship) quite admitted this; but looked forward now with satisfaction to the taming his spirit would undergo through a judiciously prolonged residence on a barren rock, with no one to uphold him in resistance to her will. Here he had no bully-Blasters to oppose a check to her influence. He would have nobody to talk to but the fisherfolk, save when he sailed down the lough to Letterkenny to be entertained by the squireens in garrison.