When I have been happy her note has sounded as though she were sweetly in love with her own melancholy, but now, how lonely it was, oh, how lonely! The young ones were always out and about, full of the multitudinous occupations of country children in summer. I would not hamper them with my lagging steps or burden them with my melancholy, so that, except for Oona, I was almost always alone. And she was not cheerful. The death of her eldest nursling had shaken her sorely, and she had grown feebler and was usually full of forebodings and omens. But for my writing I could not have endured the loneliness. I scribbled a bit in those long days, and burnt much of what I scribbled, but what I retained I laid away in the secret cupboard in Aline's room. The blessed thing about writing is that we must give it everything for the time, entire absorption. If I had had to sit and sew a seam, I think my heart would have broken. I started my novel, _Love in the Valley_, some time that July, and it progressed more to my satisfaction, and with less destruction of manuscript, than anything I had hitherto attempted. I love the book, because it helped me then, more than any of its successors. People find it sad, but the sadness and loneliness of youth are of the most monotonous gray. The future has no such illuminating flashes as come out of the past. I had always been rather starved for reading. The Brandons could never have been very bookish folk, and it is not possible to find any but very dry provender in the mouldering volumes bound in calf and gold which line the library. Why, a whole side of it is taken up by _Transactions of the Irish Parliament_, wherein many Brandons sat; and many of the later volumes are records of learned societies and such things. The little amount of literary bread to this vast deal of sack I had devoured long ago. Well, one evening in August, when I was finding my time more than usually heavy, Oona came to me where I sat on the terrace overlooking the rose-garden, and longing for once that I could fly out into the world where the human soul need not walk in such utter loneliness. She looked quite cheerful, and I turned to her, willing to be cheered. "Miss Hilda dear," she said, "I've a little bit of news for you. Rose Hill is open again." "Indeed!" said I languidly. "Who has taken it?" "A military gentleman; General Hugh MacNeill. Oh, a rale good Irish stock, though his family has lived out of the country!" "I'm glad the pretty old place is not to go to rack and ruin like many another." "Oh, they're putting the finest complexion at all on it! Thousands of painters and paper men in it, I hear, and the most elegant of furniture come down from Dublin. 'Twill be a sight when 'tis all done."