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When I came on board again I found Nigel reading over one of the notices of Harwich's death. I had begged him to put them away, and not to brood over the inevitable. I ought not to have left him. But he insisted on my taking a ride and visiting the temple, which I had never been in before. I persuaded him to put away the papers, and am devoting myself to cheering him up.
Harwich's letter had swept the dream away, and now, the first shock of her new knowledge passed, though not the anger, the almost burning sense of wrong that had followed immediately upon it, she was characteristically readjusting her point of view upon her future.
Harwich's boisterous joy was very natural, and might be supposed to spring from paternal feelings that did him honour, but there was a note of triumph in his exultation which Nigel understood, and which made him thoughtful now. Harwich was glorying in the fact that Nigel and Nigel's wife were cut out of the succession that, so far as one could see, Mrs. Armine would now never be Lady Harwich.
Now the tone of Harwich's letter was making him wonder, "Will she mind?" Presently he heard her coming into the room behind him, crossing it, stepping out upon the terrace. "Nigel! Are you asleep?" "Asleep!" he said. "At this hour!" For once there was an unnatural sound in his voice, a note of carelessness that was forced. He jumped up from his chair, scattering his letters on the ground.
Armine, Doctor Isaacson," said Lady O'Ryan, who was sitting on the Doctor's other side, and had caught part of this conversation. "You know I am always in County Clare, and as ignorant as a violet. Who is he exactly?" "A younger brother of Harwich's, and the next heir to the title."
Nigel tore open the letter, read it quickly, re-read it, then laid it down upon his knees, pulled his linen hat over his eyes, and sat for a long while quite motionless, thinking. His brother's letter informed him that his sister-in-law, Zoe, Harwich's wife, had given birth to twin children sons and that they were "stunningly well hip, hip, hooray!"
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