Sitting, his head in his hands, his eyes staring into the past,
O'Connell was facing the second great tragedy of his life.
CHAPTER II
WE MEET AN OLD FRIEND AFTER MANY YEARS
While O'Connell sat there in that little room in New York trying to
decide Peg's fate, a man, who had played some considerable part in
O'Connell's life, lay, in a splendidly furnished room in a mansion
in the West End of London--dying.
Nathaniel Kingsnorth's twenty years of loneliness and desolation
were coming to an end. What an empty, arid stretch of time those
years seemed to him as he feebly looked back on them!
After the tragedy of his sister's reckless marriage he deserted
public life entirely and shut himself away in his country-house--
except for a few weeks in London occasionally when his presence was
required on one or other of the Boards of which he was a director.
The Irish estate--which brought about all his misfortunes--he
disposed of at a ridiculously low figure. He said he would accept
any bid, however small, so that he could sever all connection with
the hated village.
From the day of Angela's elopement he neither saw nor wrote to any
member of his family.
His other sister, Mrs. Chichester, wrote to him from time to time--
telling him one time of the birth of a boy: two years later of the
advent of a girl.
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