{"product_id":"2940011968365","title":"The Lost Angel","description":"This ebook edition has been proofed and corrected for errors and compiled to be read with without errors!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e***\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ean excerpt from the beginning of the last story:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTHE KNOCKING AT THE DOOR.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOLD Maeve sat in her room in a gable of the house and stitched incessantly. It was a room that took all the storms, a south-west gable, and since Ardlewy Castle was on the Atlantic seaboard there were a good many days of the year when the boughs clashed and moaned outside the window as though in mortal pain, and the rain beat against the glass. But Maeve with her little turf-fire and the black tea-pot perpetually in the ashes was happy enough.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I do be thinkin',\" Maeve would say when Madam O'Donnell would come in and sit with her in a lonesome silence, \"of how different it used to be when we had the nurseries. Big as they are they were hardly big enough, what with Master Hugh, and Master Aymer, and Master Dermot, and Master Brien, and Master Garret, and Master Donal, and Miss Cecilia, the Lord rest them all! Isn't it a quare way that there must be only old in the castle, and the young gone out of it? It does seem unnathural like to me.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMadam was very fond of her old nurse, yet these visits to her were invariably a re-opening of old wounds. To be sure it was sad enough for all of them that the children were gone, the boys killed in battle or the hunting-field, or dying of chills, the only daughter drowned in a sudden squall when she sailed her little boat to the island, she that was as much at home on the water as the sea-mew or the gull.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMaeve had fostered the eldest son, Hugh, and had been nurse to all the rest. So she would never go out of Ardlewy while the Prince and Madam stayed in it, and she must have her little comforts so far as they could give them to her and a quiet life, darning innumerable little holes in acres of fine worn damask, sometimes mending Madam's laces or repairing the ravages time or the moth had made in silks and tapestries of curtains or furniture. The room in the gable was a little kingdom to her where she lived retired from contact with the other servants, with whom she quarrelled if she had the chance. She had her own food and her few simple utensils for cooking. She never left the gable-room except to go to Mass of Sundays or holidays.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe seemed as much a fixture in the house as the tattered flags or the suits of armour that had out-lasted so many beautiful spirited creatures of flesh and blood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo long as the Prince lived they were all safe in Ardlewy, and if the money was not much there was enough for their wants, seeing they were all so old. To be sure the heir-at-law grumbled a deal about the disrepair into which the house was falling, and the Prince was more fretted for the sake of the house than he was for the heir for whom he had no love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I wish I could take the house with me,\" he would say to Madam, \"and not have it go to Walter Burke. I never thought to see Ardlewy pass to a Burke. Weren't they always against us? Wasn't there a Queen's Burke when Owen More Art O'Donnell hid in the mountains of Munster, and he starving, and the Queen's Burke away in London singing madrigals to the Queen?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe would talk as though the Princes of Ardlewy of these latter days were not loyal men; but indeed he lived in that mist of shadows that the days of Queen Elizabeth were in a sense nearer to him than his own, and the old vexations had as much power to hurt him as the new, unless it was the vexation of knowing that Walter Burke was uneasy for his shoes, and grumbled because Ardlewy suffered. And it was a very great vexation to him that Ardlewy should suffer. There was hardly anywhere he could walk that he did not suffer this vexation, what with the long ranges of empty stabling that had been almost stripped of slates the night of the big wind, what with the gardens gone to weeds, and the gravel-paths hardly distinguishable from the beds, what with the roof that leaked, and the floors that crumbled and the more perishable stuffs that all wanted renewing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen there was the incessant encroaching damp in the acres of rooms where it was hopeless to think of lighting fires, since the servants were so old and there was no coal nearer than Galway and none to chop the trees for firewood, although the place was a wilderness with fallen trees ever since that same night of the big wind. And to be sure Walter Burke was rich and could give the place all it needed; and since the children were gone the Prince had taken the house to his heart as though it were human, and fretted over its needs as one might over a child's.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"If it were not for you, Grace,\" he would say to Madam, \"I'd as lief it were all done and over and that Walter Burke might have the place while it yet held together.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut this was only in time of much depression; and Madam hearing him would shed a tear or two.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCompared with all the rest Madam was a child. She was no more than fifty-five, while her husband was seventy-five,...","brand":"Leila's Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47078658277616,"sku":"2940011968365","price":1.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940011968365_p0.jpg?v=1763551880","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940011968365","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}