We must infer from a passage in Mr. W. H. Curran’s _Life_ of his father that Emmet’s reserve, for once, but imperfectly concealed evidences of some strong passion, political or extra-political, or both, from the oracular host of the Priory at Rathfarnham. Parenthetically, and without emphasis, Mr. Curran saw fit to warn his household against too implicit a cherishing of their engaging visitor. That Sarah’s interest in him was particular, that it was already awakened and deepening, seems never to have been surmised. According to such evidence as we have, it looks as though he had declared to her the state of his feelings before he went to Paris. It was not an hour, however, when Sarah dared to be happy. Her family had but just gathered together after a most harrowing break-up; she herself had been away for several years under the roof of a beloved clergyman in Lismore, and her homecoming was recent. Her mother, how driven to that point of revolt we know not, had eloped in 1794 with a too sympathetic neighbouring vicar. Sarah was fourteen then, and of a peculiarly sensitive temperament; and she had worshipped her mother. Her sensitiveness was not allayed by her father’s increased mental aloofness from his family, after his misfortune. Incomparably genial, when he chose, to strangers, he visited his resentments in private upon his children, her children, especially upon his son Henry, who stood in lifelong dread of him. The one little daughter of his inordinate love, Gertrude, had died by accident at twelve years old. Sarah’s sad young face was typically Irish, her noble and touching beauty stamped in every feature with irony, melancholy, and fatalism. To her lover, with his head full of all poetic ideas, she must have looked like the very spirit of Innisfail. His intensely sanguine and resolute nature may have kept him from reading in such a face their own common rune of sorrow. It is clear that his forgetting her, while he was absorbed in the grave business abroad, was out of the question. No one knows, he tells Mme. la Marquise de Fontenay, in one of his few recovered letters, what his return to Ireland and to “the sorrows before him” is costing. Memories of the past (of that long-distanced past which is proper to blasted youth) must assail him; and it will be hard to affect that he has not known “tender ties, perhaps,” which he is forbidden to resume. The lad was writing in French, and does it in character. But then, as ever, he was radically sincere. His thoughts seem to have turned towards Dublin, from motives of filial duty. His father and mother had agreed to the elder brother’s first suggestion from Paris that Robert should be induced to go to America with him; and Robert felt that so generous a permission laid its own obligation on him not to accept the parting. Everything seemed to conspire to restore him to Ireland. And with his yet-to-be-liberated Ireland, like “Flame on flame and wing on wing,”