And, indeed, Ella is charming as she now advances—very pale, as if frightened, and with her dark eyes glancing anxiously from Wyndham to the stranger and back again. She has no hat on her head, and a sunbeam has caught her chestnut hair and turned it to glistening gold. ‘I hope you received my letter last night,’ says Wyndham, calling out to her and hastening his footsteps. ‘You see’—awkwardly—‘I have brought—brought you—’ He stops, waiting for Miss Manning to come up, and growing hopelessly embarrassed. ‘Your friend, my dear, I trust,’ says Miss Manning gently, taking the girl’s hand in both her own and regarding her with anxious eyes. Ella flushes crimson. She has so dreaded, so feared, this moment, and now this gentle, sad-eyed woman, with her soft voice and pretty impulsive speech! Tears rise to the girl’s eyes. Nervously, yet eagerly, she leans forward and presses her lips to Miss Manning’s fair, if withered, cheek. Wyndham, congratulating himself on the success of his latest enterprise, takes himself off presently to inspect a farm five miles farther out in the country, that had been left to him by his mother, with the Cottage. He has determined on taking the Rectory on his way back to meet the evening train—to enlist further Mr. Barry’s sympathy for his tenant. He tells himself, with a glow of self-satisfaction, that he is uncommonly good to his tenant; but so, of course, he ought to be, that dying promise to the Professor being sacred; and if it were not for the affection he had always felt for that great dead man, he would beyond doubt never have thought of her again.... There is much moral support in this conclusion. Yes, he will spend half an hour at the Rectory. He can get back from the farm in plenty of time for that, and Miss Manning being an old friend of the Rector’s, the latter will be even more inclined to take up her pupil, which will be a good thing for the poor girl. He repeats the words ‘poor girl,’ and finds satisfaction in them. They seem to show how entirely indifferent he is to her and her fortunes. That mental slip of his awhile ago had alarmed him slightly. But ‘poor girl,’ to call her that precludes the idea of anything like—pshaw! He dismisses the ‘poor girl’ from his mind forthwith, and succeeds admirably in getting rid of her, whilst blowing up his other tenants on the farm. But on his way back again to Curraghcloyne her memory once more becomes troublesome.