He hid himself in a house at Harold’s Cross, where he had masqueraded once before, when his country’s need constrained him. Now he was there chiefly because the road in front ran towards Rathfarnham, and because, at least, he could sometime or other watch his own dear love go by. A servant, a peasant wench who was devoted to him, Anne Devlin, carried letters under her apron to the Priory, carried letters “richer than Ind” back to the proscribed master. She was a neighbouring dairyman’s daughter, and her coming and going were unquestioned. Forty years after, in her pathetic old age, she told Dr. Madden how Miss Sarah’s emotion would all but betray her: “When I handed her a letter, her face would change so, one would hardly know her.” And again: “Miss Sarah was not tall, her figure was very slight, her complexion dark, her eyes large and black, and her look was the mildest, the softest, and the sweetest look you ever saw!” All this is beautifully borne out by the Romney portrait, save that the pensive face which Romney must have begun to paint before the time of her betrothal (for after 1799 he painted hardly at all) is not olive-skinned and not black-eyed. The eyes are, in truth, very dark, but of Irish violet-grey. Every Anne Devlin in the world would have called them “black.” But one hastens to contradict a hasty phrase: there is but one Anne Devlin, a soul beyond price, who suffered afterwards and without capitulation, for her “Mr. Robert’s” sake, tortures of body and mind which read like those in the _Acta Sanctorum_. Her name will be with his when that “country shall have taken her place among the nations of the earth;” until then there is no fear but that those who care for him will keep a little candle burning to his most heroic friend.