riest regained his composure,
and was able to listen to the various requests of his friend, and to
say all that could be said to comfort and strengthen him.

Thady's first request was that he might see his father. This, Father
John felt, would be impracticable, and if accomplished would only be
in the highest degree painful. Larry was now so perfectly a lunatic,
and at the same time so resolute in his determination not to put
himself in the way of being arrested by Keegan, that it would be
impossible either to make him understand the fate which awaited his
son, or to induce him, by any means short of force, to leave his own
room. Besides, were a meeting to be effected, the idiotical father
would probably not cease to abuse his son, and would certainly not
comprehend his tenderness and affection. It was difficult to tell the
son that his father had so utterly lost his intellects as to be
unable to be brought to see him; but even this was better than
allowing him to think that he was to see him, and then deceive him.

Thady bore this blow even worse than Father John had expected that he
would do; it made him feel so desolate--so alone in the world! Stupid
and cross as his father had been for years past--cruel and unjust as
he had been on the last time they met,--still, the long time which
had passed since that meeting, and the manner in which the interview
had been passed by Thady, made him forget his father's treatment, and
only remember that he was his last surviving relative. He submitted,
however, to Father John's advice, and consented not to urge his
request.

He then talked of his sister, and began to speak more feelingly of
Ussher, and to allude to the deed which had brought him to his
dreadful doom, with more freedom than he had ever done before. The
facts of his last month's residence at Ballycloran seemed to be made
less obscure than they had been, to his mind's eye, by the distance
through which he looked at them. He appeared to comprehend more
clearly both Feemy's conduct and that of her lover, and he spoke with
the greatest affection of the former, and with justice to the latter.

"Oh! Father John," he continued, after they had been talking together
for hours, and when they had become so habituated to the presence of
the turnkey as almost to forget it, "no one but yourself can ever
know how far murder was from my thoughts that day!--nor all that I
had suffered for having listened for one moment to the plo