Curran and Sara stayed on at the Abbey, to the satisfaction of the inmates, whose skeletons rattled with less deafening jangle in the presence of strangers. Doreen was glad of Sara for a nurse. My lady, who always liked Curran, and who was being crushed into humility by impending Nemesis, was sorry to see how aged he was, and hoped that the quiet of the Abbey might do for him what it might never do for her. He lingered on to see the most of Terence, declaring that, the union passed and the prisoners gone, he would turn his back on the land he had loved too well, and crave six feet of earth from the United States. He trotted up and down the alleys of the rosary with his ex-junior, the hearts of both too full for speech. They would part soon, never again to meet in this world. They had been involved in dangers and supreme soul-conflicts, which knit hearts together more closely than a decade of conventional maundering. Both had been sorely tried, and had come out the better for the fire. The tenderness the twain felt one for the other was that of two strong natures, generous and pure--an equable, staunch tenderness, swayed by no violent passion, founded on the sure basis of esteem and confidence, such as may never be attained in any love of man for woman. This was the attitude of the two friends one to the other, in the interval that preceded the day which was to decide the fate of Ireland. Doreen was too ill to see any one. The orders of the doctor were stringent as to the necessity of extreme quiet for her. Sara issued forth now and again with bulletins; then returned to her post. Madam Gillin bearded the tigress in her lair by sending openly to inquire after the invalid. One morning Sara, neglecting her patient, came tripping forth, well rolled in furs, with unseemly gladness in her face--unseemly levity in her demeanour: 'What _do_ you think, papa?' she said, flinging her arms round Mr. Curran. 'I've got a letter to say he's coming home!' '_He?_ To whom do you refer?' demanded her father, who declined to admit that for his child there was but one 'he.' 'Robert, of course!' she replied, with shy reproach. 'Do read!'