Part 6 (1/2)

He is flushed, excited, angry; Jack is cooler and graver. His face, as he bares his head to the light breeze, looks pale.

Honor divines instinctively that he, like herself, has seen something supernatural in this apparition.

But Launce scoffs at any such idea.

”It is some blackguard,” he says scornfully, ”got up on purpose to scare folks! He was within an ace of getting his skull broken for his pains.”

Is it their overwrought fancy, or does a low mocking laugh float back to them?

Honor s.h.i.+vers.

”Let us get into the house,” she says. ”I feel as if I could not breathe out here; and don't let us talk any more about it, please!”

But Launce cannot hold his tongue; he does nothing but scoff at their credulity, and when they reach the house the first thing he does is to go straight to the dining-room and tell the whole story to his father.

The old man looks grave as he listens; it even seems to Honor if a little of the ruddy color dies out of his face.

”Best let these things alone, my boy,” he says at last.

In his own young days such things as warnings were neither scoffed at nor disbelieved in.

”Let us keep our powder and shot for men of bone and muscle like ourselves, Launce, and not waste them on shadows.”

If he had said, ”Let us ask the old abbot up to supper, and treat him to a jorum of whiskey-punch,” Launce could not have looked more surprised.

”Well,” he says in a tone if disgust, ”I did think you had more sense, father, than to believe in a fellow walking about some hundred and fifty years after his own funeral.”

The old man smiles, but he says no more; and Honor feels that the appearance of this phantom has cast a gloom over the house that was scarcely needed.

”And Launce ought to have had more sense than to talk to the _pater_ about it,” she says to herself, as she watches the squire's anxious face. ”He ought to have remembered that the last time that horrid old abbot was seen about poor grandpapa was shot; and of course everybody said the abbot had come to warn him.”

CHAPTER V.

After that night no more is seen or heard of the old abbot.

”Wait till the moonlight nights are past, and he'll turn up again,”

Launce says in his scoffing way.

But the nights are dark enough now--it is an almost sunless September, and yet they see nothing of the figure. To Honor has come an additional trouble--the engagement between her brother and Belle Delorme is broken off. Poor little Belle goes about like a ghost; her miserable eyes, which go so far to contradict the smile on her lips, fairly haunt Honor.

”If Launce ever loved her he could not bear to see her looking like that!” the girl says, in her angry surprise that he, her favorite brother, should prove so cruel. But Launce just now has eyes for no one but Kate Dundas.

The widow is more fascinating than ever. Two gentlemen are staying on a visit with her, one from London and one--who is eyed with suspicious disfavor by her poorer neighbors--from Dublin Castle itself.

There are dinners or card-parties almost every night, and, to use a vulgar expression, Launce Blake is never off the doorstep.

People are beginning to say that he will marry her and snap his fingers at the old squire, who, for some reason best known to himself, is no admirer of the brilliant widow.

”It's the greatest pity in the world that you couldn't keep your temper!” Honor says reproachfully to her friend, when she comes to tell her that the engagement is at an end. ”I always told you Launce would not stand being found fault with; sure a child could lead him.”