Aline, the dear mother of us all, was not without qualms about my visiting at Rose Hill as freely as of old, now that the house contained an additional inhabitant in the shape of an attractive young man; but what could she and I and the conventionalities do against the absolute unconsciousness of the dear old General? If I stayed away he would come or send for me, and it was as impossible for me to repulse his affection as it was for Aline to reveal her scruples to him. At last she consulted Lady O'Brien about it, and that dear woman responded with her usual common-sense: "Let the child go as before, Aline," she said. "It isn't the world, and there's no one to make invidious remarks; and if there were I'd let them talk till doomsday before I'd come between Hilda and her friends." So I came and went as of old, and soon lost much of my shyness of Captain MacNeill, whom indeed I only met at meals, or for an odd half-hour occasionally. He and his father seemed to find so much to take them out of the house now. The General had become so keen and alert about things that thirty years might have been suddenly lifted off his life, and as I became aware of how they were being sought by the neighbours--we called everyone within thirty miles neighbours--and being asked here and there, and besought to take up this and that position, I was conscious of an odd kind of jealousy. General MacNeill and Rose Hill had seemed so much to belong to me, that if it was going to be swamped now by the county families, and I driven out, as I surely should be if they came in,--well then, I shouldn't be too well pleased, that was all. Certainly they had not come yet, and the greater stir in the house caused by its new inhabitant was so far distinctly pleasant. Mary O'Connor felt it as I did. "'Tis more heartsome like," she said to me one day, "to have the young master to do for. The General is a desperate tidy gentleman, an' if it was only the cigar-ash on the floor, or the clothes flung anyway about the room, or even the bath-water splashed to that unchristian extent that it comes through the dinin'-room ceilin', I'd rather have a young gentleman to look after. Let alone that that Hawkins waits on the ould master like a cat in boots, till the silence and the tidiness grew so lonesome that I often had a mind to take a stravague through the rooms meself an' turn everything upside down. But, glory be! that onnatural temptation is removed from my path to-day." Captain MacNeill was quite a long time at home before he saw Esther. She was not well in those days, and rather shrunk from meeting strangers. I used to wonder how the sight of her would affect him, for though Esther needed happiness to bring out her beauty in full bloom, yet the sorrow that dimmed her colour had given her eyes a more mysterious midnight beauty, so that, to my mind, she was lovelier for anyone who had eyes to see.