But hardly had he begun when a startling incident happened. The old Lord
Raa of Castle Raa, head of the O'Neills, the same that had sworn at my
grandmother, after many years in which he had lived a bad life abroad
where he had contracted fatal maladies, returned to Ellan to die. Being
a bachelor, his heir would have been Captain O'Neill, but my mother's
father had died during the previous winter, and in the absence of direct
male issue it seemed likely that both title and inheritance (which, by
the conditions of an old Patent, might have descended to the nearest
living male through the female line) would go to a distant relative, a
boy, fourteen years of age, a Protestant, who was then at school at
Eton.
More than ever now my father chewed the cud of his great disappointment.
But it is the unexpected that oftenest happens, and one day in the
spring, Doctor Conrad, being called to see my mother, who was
indisposed, announced that she was about to bear a child.
My father's delight was almost delirious, though at first his happiness
was tempered by the fear that the child that was to be born to him might
not prove a boy.
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