He hesitates. “I was staggered for a moment, I will own,” he answers, with candid gravity; “but I have been thinking it over, and on reflection I have come to the conclusion that the highly excited state of your imagination is answerable for the heightening of the resemblance which exists between all the Irish of that class into an identity with the particular Irishman you dreamed of, and whose face (by your own showing) you only saw dimly reflected in the glass.” “_Not_ dimly,” repeat I emphatically, “unless I now see that sun dimly” (pointing to him, as he gloriously, blindingly blazes from the sky). “You will not be warned by me then?” I continue passionately, after an interval. “You will run the risk of my dream coming true--you will stay on here in spite of it? Oh, if I could persuade you to go from home--anywhere--anywhere--for a time, until the danger was past!” “And leave the harvest to itself?” answers he, with a smile of quiet sarcasm; “be a loser of two hundred or three hundred pounds, probably, and a laughing-stock to my acquaintance into the bargain, and all for--what? A dream--a fancy--a nightmare!” “But do you know anything of the man?--of his antecedents?--of his character?” I persist eagerly. He shrugs his shoulders. “Nothing whatever; nothing to his disadvantage, certainly. He came over with a lot of others a fortnight ago, and I engaged him for the harvesting. For anything I have heard to the contrary, he is a simple inoffensive fellow enough.” I am silenced, but not convinced. I turn to Jane. “You remember your promise: you will now put no more hindrances in the way of my going?” “You do not mean to say that you are going, really?” says Jane, who is looking rather awed by what she calls the surprising coincidence, but is still a good deal heartened up by her husband’s want of faith. “I do,” reply I, emphatically. “I should go stark staring mad if I were to sleep another night in that room. I shall go to Chester to-night, and cross to-morrow from Holyhead.” I do as I say. I make my maid, to her extreme surprise, repack my just unpacked wardrobe and take an afternoon train to Chester. As I drive away with bag and baggage down the leafy lane, I look back and see my two friends standing at their gate. Jane is leaning her head on her old man’s shoulder, and looking rather wistfully after me: an expression of mingled regret for my departure and vexation at my folly clouding their kind and happy faces. At least my last living recollection of them is a pleasant one. CHAPTER IV. The joy with which my family welcome my return is largely mingled with surprise, but still more largely with curiosity, as to the cause of my so sudden reappearance. But I keep my own counsel. I have a reluctance to give the real reason, and possess no inventive faculty in the way of lying, so I give none. I say, “I _am_ back: is not that enough for you? Set your minds at rest, for that is as much as you will ever know about the matter.”