“I never forgot those plans of ours,” said the doctor’s wife, her eyes full of pleasant reminiscence.  “But here I’ve been, nearly eleven years, duly keeping house and raising four small babies in a row.  And what about you?  You’ve been gadding all over Europe—­never a word about coming home to Carolan Hall until this year!”

“I know,” said Mrs. Carolan, with a charming air of apology.  “Oh, I know!  But Sid had to hunt up his references abroad, you know, and then there was that hideous legal delay.  I really have been frantic to settle down somewhere, for years.  And as for poor Peter!  The unfortunate baby has been farmed out in Italy, and boarded in Rome, and flung into English sanitariums, just as need arose!  The marvel is he’s not utterly ruined.  But Peter’s unique—­you’ll love him!”

“Who’s he like, Jean?”

“Oh, Sidney!  He’s Carolan all through.”  With the careless words a thin veil of shadow fell across her bright face, and there came a long silence.

Carolan Hall!  Jean had never seen it before to-day.  Looking at the garden, and the trees, and the roof that showed beyond, she felt as if she had not truly seen it until this minute.  All its gloomy history, half forgotten, lightly brushed aside, came back to her slowly now.  This was the home of her husband’s shadowed childhood; it was here that those terrible events had taken place of which he had so seriously told her before their wedding day.

Here old Peter Carolan, her little Peter’s great-grandfather, had come with his two dark boys and his silent wife, eighty years before.  A cruel, passionate man he must have been, for stories presently crept about the county of the whippings that kept his boys obedient to him.  Rumor presently had an explanation of the wife’s shadowed life.  There had been a third boy, the first-born, whom no whippings could make obedient.  That boy was dead.

The day came when old Peter’s blooded mare refused him obedience, too, and stood trembling and mutinous before the bars he would have had her take.  He presently had his way, and the lovely, frightened creature went bravely over.  But after that he rode her at that fence day after day, and sometimes the wood rang for an hour with his shouting and urging before she would essay the leap.  While he forced her, Madam Carolan sat at the one library window that gave on the road, and knotted her hands together and waited.  She waited, one gusty March evening, until the shouting stopped, and the bewildered mare came trotting riderless into view.  Then she and the maids ran to the wood.  But even after that she still sat at that window at the end of every day, a familiar figure to all who came and went upon the road.