"Must it be so soon?" I asked coyly, and with a blush upon my cheeks that was not caused by the blaze of the logs. "Must it be now?" "In very truth it must," he answered. "I must away to England as swiftly as may be. See here, sweet, what I have found at Jamestown to-day." Then with one arm round my waist, he drew forth with his disengaged hand a packet of letters from his pocket and began to read them to me. "The Marquis," he said first, "grows old, nay, has grown old; he is seventy-five if an hour. List what he says," and continued his reading of a letter from that noble kinsman: "I would have you here ere I die so that I may publicly announce you as my heir, and this I will do in my own house when you return, though even then I can of no certainty promise that the Lords will enrol you as such immediately after my death, since they are not so easily persuaded as their brothers in Dublin. Yet come, I say, come as soon as may be. Your mother, too, grows more feeble, worn almost to her grave by the slanders which your uncle and the man Considine--who scruples not to say openly that you are none other than _his_ son--puts about you; and in truth I do think these calumnies will kill her ere long. She rages terribly against them both, and calls on me and many of the peers in power to punish them; yet what are we to do?" "The vile wretches!" I exclaimed, as I nestled close to him. "Oh! the vile wretches! Oh! my darling, that thus your birthright should be so assailed." "Yet will I have vengeance," he exclaimed, while his eyes glowed with resentment. "Yet shall the fellow Considine regret that he has ever dared to call me his son. His--his. God! My uncle's drunken pander!" and for a while his rage was terrible to witness. Then, taking up another letter, he said, "This also I found at Jamestown to-day. It is from her, from my mother." She, too, wrote saying how earnestly she desired that he might soon be able to return home, and more especially so as she heard that the fleet under Sir Chaloner Ogle was about to do so. Then, after mentioning somewhat the same news as the Marquis had done, she went on: