“Why, some one came from these parts to enlighten my blindness.  He was hunting for treasure.  I knew where the treasure lay, twenty fathoms deep, in a little bay of an island in the South Seas.  What use was treasure to me since I could not come home?  I have known murder and worse done over treasure.  I knew it was there, and I let it be.  The gentle, brown people of the islands had no use for it.  It would only have brought in lawless and desperate men to disturb the peace of that Garden of Eden.  Now it makes me a rich man.  It makes him in whose charge I have left it a rich man.  He will bring home the treasure.  Like me, he thinks of it only as a means to an end.”

“You will be able to pay the mortgage,” my grandfather said, with an air of immense relief.

Then he seemed to remember something; and he cried out suddenly that Garret Dawson held an I.O.U. which Uncle Luke had given to Sir Jasper Tuite for five thousand guineas.

“He said it would hang you,” the poor old man went on, sobbing and stumbling in his speech, “because, of course, it would prove that you had a motive for shooting Jasper Tuite.  He said other things, dreadful for a father and mother to hear.”

“But you did not believe them!” Uncle Luke said.  “You did not believe them!  I did owe Jasper Tuite five thousand guineas.  It was a card debt.  I should have known better than to play with a man of his reputation; but I repaid it, every penny.  I have his receipt for it.  What else, father?”

“That there was a girl, a girl whom—­I should not speak of such things in Bawn’s presence and your mother’s—­whom you had wronged.  She had been on the stage in Dublin, and she accounted for your extravagance at that time.  He said that Jasper Tuite came between you, tried to save the girl from you.  He said it would be a pretty case to go before a jury, that you had cause, even more than the money, to hate Jasper Tuite and wish him out of the way.”

“And you believed it?”

I saw Lord St. Leger cower, and I said out of my pity and love for him—­

“Uncle Luke, he is old, and you had left him He could not disprove the things even if he did not believe them.”

Uncle Luke’s face changed.  He looked down at his father.

“We will give him the lie together,” he said; and then he noticed the blood on the white hair and was terrified, till we assured him it was nothing.  “So little Bawn was the price of Garret Dawson’s silence,” he said; and then added solemnly that he could never have forgiven himself if the price had been paid.

At this point the door of the room was opened, and Neil Doherty, bowing on the threshold, announced that supper was served.  And we remembered that Uncle Luke must be hungry, and his mother reproached herself, while he remembered for the first time that he had not eaten for many hours.

I don’t know how Neil had managed it in the time, but the house was lit from top to bottom and the servants were standing in a line for us to pass through, all with happy faces.  And Maureen stood at the head of them, as though she only had the right.