‘No ... no’—he rallied wonderfully—‘three hundred a year—that for a girl.... The rest is yours.... But see to her.... I can trust you. You are a good boy. But your Greek, boy—your Greek is bad—your aorists are weak. You must mend—you must mend....’ His dying eyes tried to take the old stern look as they rested on Wyndham, the look he used to give the boy when his Greek or his Latin verses were hardly up to the mark, but presently it changed and softened into a wider light. ‘The boy,’ in the last of all moments, was forgotten for the love that was strongest of all. ‘She was very like my wife,’ he gasped faintly, and fell back and died. * * * * * It was all over. The doctors had taken their departure, and the old dismal house was very still. The Professor had died in the morning, and it was quite night again before Wyndham had time to think of ordinary matters. It was the presence of Denis, who had come up to see, probably, how his master had continued to live so long without him, that brought back the thought of the girl to Wyndham’s mind. ‘Where did you take her?’ he asked listlessly. Even as the words passed his lips he knew it was most important that she should be found again. She was now the inheritress of three hundred a year—no mean thing for a girl who only last night was ready and willing to die of want, amongst other things, no doubt. ‘To the Cottage, sir.’ ‘To——’ Wyndham gazed at him as if too astonished to give way to the words that evidently lay very near to his tongue. ‘The Cottage, sir. Yer own place, sir.’ ‘The Cottage,’ repeated Wyndham, now breaking forth in earnest. ‘What the devil did you take her there for?’ His extreme anger would have cowed perhaps any other servant in Europe save Denis. That good man stood to his guns without a flinch. ‘Fegs, sir, ’tis you can answer that,’ said he, with quite an encouraging air. ‘What d’ye mean, Denis?’ demanded Wyndham almost violently. ‘I’m manin’—what I’m manin’,’ said Denis, who certainly was not violent at all. ‘Ye know yourself, sir, that the first thing ye said to me about the crathur was to take her to the safest place ye knew.’ ‘Well?’ said Wyndham, with anger he tried hard to stifle. ‘Faix, yer honour, it seemed to me that the safest place I knew for the young lady was the house that belonged to yer honour.’ This no doubt was distinctly flattering, but at the moment the flattery did not appeal to Wyndham. The girl down there—and what the deuce was he to do with her? And what would all the people round be thinking?—for the most part country folk. The Cottage lay twenty miles outside Dublin. The Rector, Mr. Barry, would for one be positively enraged. He would require all sorts of explanations. Denis had waited for a reply, but finding none, now went on: ‘Anything wrong, sir?’