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The Round Lodge at Kilrath is so ornate a little structure, with its pillared portico and fantastic pagoda-like roof, that it looks as incongruous in the lonesome grass-lands, amongst which it is solitarily set, as a single pelargonium or calceolaria would look among their ragweed and thistles. Only the old people recollect how it was built by way of being a gate-lodge on one of the new roads which there was talk of young Mr Hall making at the time he came into the property, but which, like many more of his schemes, were never carried out. None of them, in fact, ever took a substantial form except the Round Lodge, his promptness in this matter being caused by a long-standing promise to his old nurse that if he succeeded to the Kilrath estate she should have "a little house of her own. " As his regard for the old woman was one of the few interests he had left unshrivelled by the gambling fever that had fastened on him, he found an eager pleasure in keeping his word to her, and travelled all the way down from Dublin that he might be present at her induction into her new abode.
It was a moteless morning in early summer, when the curved masses of the wood still had a misty softness of hue, and the green of the fresh lawns looked as unwitherable as the domed blue above them. The Round Lodge gleamed most spick and span within and without, its brilliant tiles glowing, and the violet and amber panes in its glass door richly staining the sunbeams that crowded into the little porch. Mrs Moran, glancing round the cosy sitting-room with bright quick eyes like a bird's, felt herself happy indeed, though she only _said_ she dared say she might make a shift to manage well enough, once she had the things set to rights a bit herself in her own way; which would have sounded faint praise to anybody who did not know her. But when she was left there to her own devices, she became subject to fits of forlorn "lonesomeness," at intervals which grew shorter day by day as the first gloss of ownership wore off.