hat the poor beast's legs were
broken. So I ended its misery, and made my way as best I could by the
stars to your house; but I turned sick and fainted at the door, and knew
no more until this hour. ... You thought me dead, father?"

The priest bowed his head, and said: "These are strange, sad things, my
child; and they shall seem stranger to you when you hear all."

"When I hear all! Ah, tell me, father, do you know Shon McGann? Can you
take me to him?"

"I know him, but I do not know where he is. He left the Pipi Valley
eighteen months ago, and I never saw him afterwards; still I doubt not
he is somewhere on the plains, and we shall find him--we shall find him,
please Heaven."

"Is he a good lad, father?"

"He is brave, and he was always kind. He came to me before he left the
valley--for he had trouble--and said to me: 'Father, I am going away,
and to what place is far from me to know, but wherever it is, I'll live
a life that's fit for men, and not like a loafer on God's world;' and he
gave me money for masses to be said--for the dead."

The girl put out her hand. "Hush! hush!" she said. "Let me think. Masses
for the dead.... What dead? Not for me; he thought me dead long, long
ago."

"No; not for you," was the slow reply.

She noticed his hesitation, and said: "Speak. I know that there is
sorrow on him. Someone--someone--he loved?"

"Someone he loved," was the reply.

"And she died?" The priest bowed his head.

"She was his wife--Shon's wife"? and Mary Callen could not hide from her
words the hurt she felt.

"I married her to him, but yet she was not his wife." There was a keen
distress in the girl's voice. "Father, tell me, tell me what you mean."

"Hush, and I will tell you all. He married her, thinking, and she
thinking, that she was a widowed woman. But her husband came back. A
terrible thing happened. The woman believing, at a painful time, that he
who came back was about to take Shon's life, fired at him, and wounded
him, and then killed herself."

Mary Callen raised herself upon her elbow, and looked at the priest in
piteous bewilderment. "It is dreadful," she said.... "Poor woman!... And
he had forgotten--forgotten me. I was dead to him, and am dead to him
now. There's nothing left but to draw the cold sheet of the grave over
me. Better for me if I had never come--if I had never come, and instead
were lyin' by his father and mother beneath the rowan."

The priest took her wrist firmly in h