r as you are blaming her. He will come to speak words of comfort
and consolation into my ear. Instead of that, Father O'Rourke, you have
brought nothing but cursing. You tell me I am in the downward road to
destruction. Is that the way you should speak to a lone widow, because
she loves her son, and likes those to speak who knew him, and who would
talk about him to her and praise him, and who tell her what a noble,
clever youth he was?"

"Widow O'Neil!" exclaimed Father O'Rourke, an angry frown gathering on
his brow, "year after year I have spoken to you as I am now speaking. I
have warned you before, I have warned your boy Dermot. I tell you, he
would not take the warning, and he would have suffered the consequences
of his disobedience, but I do care for your soul, and it is on account
of that soul that I want you to put faith in the holy mother Church. If
you do, all will be right, but if you go and listen to the words of that
Protestant minister, all will be wrong, and you, Widow O'Neil, will have
to go and live for ever with the accursed; ay, for ever and ever in fire
and torment." With such force and energy did the priest speak, and so
fierce did he look, that for the moment he made the poor old woman
tremble and turn pale with fear. She quickly, however, recovered
herself.

"You may go, Father O'Rourke," she exclaimed. "Once I was your slave,
but I am your slave no longer. I am a poor ignorant woman, but I have
had the truth told me, and that truth has made me free of you; say what
you will, I do not fear you."

The priest on hearing these words positively stamped on the ground, and
gnashed his teeth with anger. He was not one of the polished fathers of
the Church, who have been taught from their youth to conceal their
feelings. He was certainly not a trained disciple of Ignatius Loyola.
Again and again he stamped, and then uttering a fearful anathema on the
occupant of the hut, he turned round, and slamming the door, left her as
he had often before done, and hastened upwards towards the cliffs.

While this scene was enacting below, a young naval officer, who had
landed from a boat which had come from the corvette, lately brought up
in the bay, had climbed to the summit of the downs, and was taking his
way across them towards the gorge, up which the priest was hastening.
He had, however, not got very far, when he heard a voice singing a wild
and plaintive Irish air. He stopped to listen, and as he