CHAPTER X.
THE TRAP The sight of the red sun sinking down a long, green avenue turned my thoughts for a moment from the painful memory of Richard Dawson's rudeness, which, now that I had escaped from him, made me feel sick and ashamed.
It was something I could never tell to anybody, and I felt as though I must carry some shameful secret all my days and that it must appear in my face, and I was glad that I need not meet the eyes of my grandparents by daylight, but could deceive their dear, dim sight in the shaded candle-light and afterwards have the night to recover myself.
With a young girl's extremity of virginal pride and modesty, I hated even myself because he had touched me and could have disfigured the face he had praised.
But the red sun glinting down the long arcades, promising another fine day to-morrow, gave my thoughts a welcome turn.

I remembered how it had shone yesterday in the long line of windows at Brosna; and that led me to think of Anthony Cardew.
He had the most romantic stories attaching to him, such stories as were sure to please a young girl's fancy.

It was to be sure not a name we mentioned at Aghadoe.

Indeed, even before I knew about Uncle Luke there was something that forbade my talking of the Cardews before Lord and Lady St.Leger or before my godmother.
Only old Maureen, who so often mixed up the present and the past, would talk of the Cardews as though their name had never been banned, as though they still came and went as friends and intimates at Aghadoe Abbey as in the days before the trouble came about Uncle Luke.
I knew that Captain Cardew had long since retired from the army, and that one never knew in what corner of the world he might not be, since wherever adventures were to be found he was.
I knew that he had spent many years of his life--he must be now nearly forty, which was a great age to me--in the service of an unhappy great lady whose little kingdom had been unjustly taken from her, and in her cause he had spent his patrimony which had once been great.

And now since she no longer lived, having given up her gentle soul some two years after she had sought the shelter of the convent against a rough world, he was free once more to devote his sword of Don Quixote to some other lost cause.
I knew, furthermore, that he was reported to have raised money from Mr.
Dawson of Damerstown at ruinous interest to spend it in the service of the Princess Pauline, and that he was now very poor, too poor to keep his old home from going to pieces and being consumed by the damp and by rats and mice and general decay.
People used to wonder he did not try to sell it.