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advances to her. All we can do now is hope and pray she has learned from the experience and will be a little wiser when the next fortune hunter makes his inevitable approach.
    So much for Mr. Kinsella. The gossips of Gower, needless to say, are having a fine time exercising their tongues, but believe nothing you hear which does not accord with the above account.
    You were perfectly correct in your assumptions regarding Ginevra’s virtue; you may be distressed that her reputation has suffered, as it inevitably has, but you may rest assured that she has not been sullied beyond redemption by this squalid but by no means catastrophic experience. (Your remarks on the subject were somewhat singular but I realize you were trying to express yourself with propriety and on the whole, considering your youth, I think you did well. In future, however, you should not allude to the carnal capacities of gentlemen in any letter you may write to a female. This is most definitely not The Done Thing.)
    And now I must close this letter. I do hope I have to some extent alleviated, any anxiety you may have suffered through being ill-informed, but should there be any further questions you wish to ask about this unfortunate incident, please do write to me at once so that I can set your mind at rest. Meanwhile I send all my love and in adding that I long to see you again I remain, dearest Robert, your most affectionate and devoted MAMA .
    VI
    I BECAME OBSESSED WITH the name Conor Kinsella. I remember writing it down and as I stared at it I thought what a sinister name it was, so foreign, so different, so smooth yet so aggressive, the stress falling on the first syllable of each word so that the hard C and the hard K seemed doubly emphasized, twin bullets of sound followed by the soft ripple of easy consonants and vowels. The Porteynon Kinsellas, an elderly celibate trio of a brother and two sisters, were descended from an Irish pirate, sole survivor of an eighteenth-century shipwreck in Rhossili Bay, and the wild lawless Gower Peninsula of a hundred years ago had been just the place for a wild lawless Irishman to settle down and feel at home.
    Remembering the past I at once saw Conor Kinsella as an Irish pirate, invading my home and capturing what was mine by right. Scraping the barrel of my unsophisticated vocabulary I thought of him as a cad and a blackguard, a rip, a rake and a rotter, but all the while I was reducing him to cardboard in this fashion I was aware that somewhere in the world was a flesh-and-blood man ten years my senior who ate and drank and slept and breathed and shaved and cursed and counted his pennies with anxiety and probably gave flowers to his mother on her birthday and perhaps even helped little old ladies over the road on his way to church.
    The truth was that I knew nothing of Conor Kinsella. Yet when I finally saw him, I recognized him at once, not merely because he fitted my mother’s chilling description but because I sensed he was like Ginette, and in knowing her I knew him.
    I am uncertain how I knew that he was going to come back into her life. Perhaps it was because in the beginning she herself was so sure of it.
    “He swore he’d come back for me,” she said. “He told me he’d go to America and make some money and then he’d come back and sweep me off on horseback into the sunset and we’d get married and live happily ever after.”
    “I didn’t know men ever talked such rot. You didn’t believe him, did you?”
    “Yes, I did. He meant it.”
    We were at All-Hallows Court, the Applebys’ home, which stood three miles from Oxmoon on the parish boundary of Penhale and Llangennith. The house, which was considerably smaller than Oxmoon, was what we in South Wales call a squarsonage, meaning that it was a cross between the home of a parson and the residence of a country squire, and the unlikely name was said (erroneously no doubt) to be a corruption of “Hail Mary,” the last words of a group of Catholics