CHAPTER XIV.
Home News, and Interviewing a Nationalist.
About ten days after their arrival at Killarney, Lesbia received from her mother a reply to a long letter of her own narrating the previous events. A few extracts from Mrs Newman’s answer will suffice.
‘My Darling Lesbia,—I was delighted to get your interesting letter at last, and to know that on the whole you are enjoying your trip, in spite of the parting from your Yankee friend, whom I do not dislike, although I should not care to resemble her. What a lovely place Killarney must be! I have seen many paintings of it, but nothing which comes up to your description. Now I must tell you, dearest, that a certain part of your letter startled me very much, and that is your description of your picnic from Queenstown to Roche’s Tower. There is nothing extraordinary in your having seen an old lighthouse on a high hill by the sea, but then you go on to say that an absorbing and painful interest, which there was no reason for, took possession of you while you walked over the ground. It is this which forces me to connect the real place you have come upon with that terrible day-dream you remember my having more than a year ago. God forbid there should be anything in it, but if there is, what more natural than that you, my child, should feel by
