“We’ll come back great folks and buy out the old ’uns,” he had said to her thirty-five years earlier, as they had meekly set down their bundles and umbrellas amongst the steerage passengers of the emigrant ship and seen the shores of Ireland fade from their sight as the day had waned. All through the thirty-five years which he had spent on alien soil he had never forgotten his object; he had lived miserably, saving and screwing, paring and hoarding, happy in the knowledge that his “pile” grew and grew and grew, a little bigger, a little broader, with every day which dawned; and when it was big enough and broad enough for him to sit on it, monarch of all which he might choose to survey, he said to his wife: “Marg’ret, woman, it’s time to shut up the store. We’ll be going home, I’m thinkin’, and buyin’ the old ’uns out. I said as I’d do it, didn’t I, five-and-thirty year agone?” And his wife, being only a woman and therefore foolish, burst out crying and threw her apron over her head. “But the dear old folk they be dead, William; and dead be my poor babies too!” Then her William smiled; a very rare thing to see was a smile on his tight straight lips. “’Tisn’t those old folks I’m meanin’--and ye’ve your daughter surely to comfort ye; we’ll marry her to a lord duke.” Margaret Massarene had dried her tears knowing that weeping would not bring her back her old parents whose bones lay under the rich grass in Kilrathy, nor her little lost boys who had been killed--two in a blizzard on the cruel central plains, and one in a forest fire by a rushing herd of terrified cattle. She had dried her tears, bought her sealskins and velvets as she was bidden to do, and come eastward with her lord in all the pomp and plenty which can be purchased on a first-class ocean steamer, and when the distant line of the low green shores of Cork became visible to her, she had turned round the rings on her large fingers and patted the heavy bracelets on her wrists to make sure that both were real, and said in her own heart if only the old people had been living, if only her three boys had been there beside her, if only she could go once more a buxom girl in a cotton frock through the sweet wet grass with her milking stool! But William Massarene, as he looked at the low green shores, had no such fond and futile regrets; he set his legs wide apart and crossed his hands on the handle of his stick and said only to himself, with a pride which was fairly legitimate if its sources were foul-- “I did as I said I’d do; I’ve come back as I said I’d come back.” For him, the herdsman who had tramped to and fro the pastures in the falling rain, carrying a newly-dropped calf after its mother, or driving a heifer to meet the butcher’s knife, had been dead and gone for five-and-thirty years; there was only alive now William Massarene, millionaire ten times over, who had the power of the purse in his pocket and meant to buy Great Britain and Ireland with it.