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CHAPTER VIII
THE WEDDING-GOWN
It was said, but with what truth I cannot say, that the Roche
property had been owned by the O'Dwyers many years ago, several
generations past, sometime in the eighteenth century. Only a faint
legend of this ownership remained; only once had young Mr. Roche
heard of it, and it was from his mother he had heard it; among the
country people it was forgotten. His mother had told him that his
great-great-grandfather, who had made large sums of money abroad,
had increased his property by purchase from the O'Dwyers, who then
owned, as well as farmed, the hillside on which the Big House
stood. The O'Dwyers themselves had forgotten that they were once
much greater people than they now were, but the master never spoke
to them without remembering it, for though they only thought of
themselves as small farmers, dependents on the squire, every one
of them, boys and girls alike, retained an air of high birth,
which at the first glance distinguished them from the other
tenants of the estate. Though they were not aware of it, some
sense of their remote origin must have survived in them, and I
think that in a still more obscure way some sense of it survived
in the country side, for the villagers did not think worse of the
O'Dwyers because they kept themselves aloof from the pleasures of
the village and its squabbles. The O'Dwyers kept themselves apart
from their fellows without any show of pride, without wounding
anyone's feelings.
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