She had stopped now and listened to him, startled.  Then she turned again, looked at the tranquil hills and the far-stretching woods of Inchguile, and the smoke curling from many a poor hearthstone.  A vision flashed across her mind of a life spent here in the country she had learned to love, amongst the people she longed to succour, with for a helper the strong, skilful man who had stood with her by so many beds of sickness.  Then she thought of what her future would be in a luxurious English household.  She could see the well-regulated property, the tidy cottages, where squire and parson would permit her help, but not need it.  An old woman looked from her doorway as they passed and said:  “God speed ye!  God bring ye safe home and to heaven!”

They had come to the high road now, and as they stopped to let a drove of cattle pass, she turned and met the Doctor’s wistful eyes with a flash of enthusiasm in hers.

“I will stay,” she said.  “I will give my life to Cloon and its poor!”

Then, as they reached the stile which led into Inagh, she crossed it lightly and walked up the narrow path, scarcely remembering to look back before she was out of sight and wave her hand in farewell to her happy lover.

Happy was not, perhaps, the word to describe him by.  A sudden rapture had swept over him, blinding his vision, when she had said, “I will stay.”  Yet now that she was out of sight without having deigned him one touch of her hand, one soft word, he felt as if all had been a dream; and was also conscious of a feeling, too subtle to be formed into a thought, that there was something wanting in this supreme moment which surely is not wanting when two hearts for the first time know themselves to be beating for each other.  But she had always been such an object of worship to him, as one beyond his sphere, that he remembered how far away she had been from him but yesterday, and that doubtless the ordinary rules of love must be put aside when one so high stooped to crown the life of so unworthy a worshipper.

II.

Colonel Eden returned that evening, and for some days Louise was constantly occupied with his affairs, driving and walking with him and listening to his plans and projects, and thus giving up her own solitary expeditions and visits.

She was glad of the excuse to do this.  The moment of exaltation in which she had resolved to devote her life to these poor Galway peasants had passed away, and though she kept pictures before her mind of a redeemed district, and children brought up in health and cleanliness instead of disease and dirt, and home industries taking the place of the idleness that followed spasmodic labour, misgivings entered with them as she saw herself no longer “the lady” who stooped from a high level, but a mere doctor’s wife (she would not admit even to her thoughts the undesirable title of “Mrs. Quin"), living in that small staring house at the entrance