“Mount Rorke is considered to be a handsome place, but as I have known it from childhood, as my earliest memories are of it, I cannot see it with the eyes of a professed scenery hunter. I have loved it always, but I do not think I ever loved it more than now, for now I think that one day I shall give it to you. Should that day come--and it will come--what happiness it will be to walk with you under the old trees, made lovelier by your presence, to pass down the glades to the river, watching your shadow on the grass and your image in the stream. We will roam together through the old castle, and I will show you the little bed I used to sleep in, the school-room where I learned my lessons. When I entered the old room I saw in imagination--and oh, how clearly!--the face of my governess; and how easily I see her in the corridor she used to walk down to get to her room. “Poor, dear, old thing, I wonder what has become of her! “I saw again the pictures that stirred my childish fancy, and whose meaning I once vainly strove to decipher. “I came to live here when I was four, immediately after my father's death. I can just remember coming here. I remember Mount Rorke taking me up in his arms and kissing me. I will not say there is no place like home--I do not believe that; but certainly no place seems so real. Every spot of ground has its own particular recollections. Every bend of the avenue evokes some incident of childish life (in Ireland we call any road leading to a house an avenue, even if it is absolutely bare of trees; we also speak of rooks as crows, and these two provincialisms jarred on my ear after my long stay in Sussex). Mount Rorke is covered with trees--great woods of beech and fir--and at the end of every vista you see a piece of blue mountain. A river passes behind the castle, winding through the park; there are bridges, and swans float about the sedges, and there are deer in the glades. The garden,--I do not know if you would like the garden; it is old-fashioned--full of old-fashioned flowers--convolvuluses, Michaelmas daisies, marigolds; hedges clipped into all sorts of strange and close shapes. There is a beautiful avenue behind the garden (an avenue in the English sense of the word) where you may pace to and fro and feel an exquisite sense of solitude; for when the castle had passed out of the hands of Irish princes--that is to say, brigands--it was turned into a monastery, and I often think, as I look on the mossy trees--the progeny of those under whose leafage the monks told their beads--that all happened that I might throw my arm about you some beautiful day, and whisper, 'My wife, this is yours.'” “How beautifully he writes,” said Sally reflectively. “You never had a lover who wrote to you like that. Do you remember how Jimmy used to write?”