"Sir," she said after she had given him her hand, which Oliver bent over and kissed as a gentleman might have done, and with a grace which, I think, he must have acquired when he followed the great Duke twenty years before and was himself a gallant young soldier of eighteen years of age. "Sir, how shall a poor widow thank you for all that you have done for her son and your friend?"--here Oliver smiled pleasedly at my being termed his friend, but disclaimed having done aught of much weight for me. "Nay, nay," she went on, "do not say that. Why! you have brought him forth from the jaws of death, you have saved him from those scheming villains to place him in his mother's arms again, you have risked your own safety to do so--shall I not thank you deeply, tenderly, for all that?" "Madam," Oliver said, "my lady, I could not see the poor youth so set and put upon and stand idly by without so much as lending him a hand. And, my lady, if there was any reason necessary for helping him beyond that of mercy towards one so sorely afflicted as he was, I had it in the fact that I had known him long before at New Ross." "At New Ross!" my mother exclaimed. "At New Ross! Is that your part of the country?" "It is, my lady, and there, after quitting the army, I lived for many years working at my trade. And it was there that I have often seen Gerald--as I have come to call him, madam, since we have been drawn so close together, tho' I am not forgetful of his rank nor of the respect due to it--with you and with his late lordship, more especially when you all drove into New Ross in the light chaise my lord brought from London, or when Gerald would ride into the town on his pony with his groom." These recollections, more especially that of the light chaise which had been a new toy, or gift, from my father to his wife at the time they were living happily together and he still had some means, disturbed my dear mother so much that the tears sprang to her eyes. And Oliver, who was tender as a child in spite of his determination and great fierceness when about any business which demanded such qualities, desisted at once and, turning his remarks into such a channel as he doubtless thought more acceptable, went on to say: "And, my lady, none who ever saw his present lordship then--and there are scores still alive who have done so--but would testify to him. So it cannot be but that his uncle must ere long desist from the wicked and iniquitous claims he has put forward and be utterly routed and defeated, when my lord here shall enjoy his own." "I pray so. I pray so," said my mother. "And, moreover, his kinsman the Marquis now seems, since my husband's death, to veer more to our side than to Robert's. So we may hope."