"I'm glad she's gone," she said; "but it's not her, father, that I ought
to raise my hand against."

"Who then, Sarah?" he asked, with something like surprise.

"You asked me," she proceeded, "to assist in a plan to have Mave
Sullivan carried off by young Dick o' the Grange--I'm now ready for
anything, and I'll do it. This world, father, has nothing good or happy
in it for me--now I'll be aquil to it; if it gives me nothing good,
it'll get nothing out of me. I'll give it blow for blow; kindness, good
fortune, if it was to happen--but it can't now--would soften me; but I
know, I feel that ill-treatment, crosses, disappointments, an' want of
all hope in this life, has made, an' will make me a devil--ay, an' oh!
what a different girl I might be this day!"

"What has vexed you?" asked the father "for I see that something has."

"Isn't it a cruel thing," she proceeded, without seeming to have
attended to him; "isn't it a cruel thing to think that every one you
see about you has some happiness except yourself; an' that your heart is
burstin', an' your brain burnin', an' no relief for you; no one point
to turn to, for consolation--but everything dark and dismal, and fiery
about you?"

"I feel all this myself," said the Prophet; "so, don't be disheartened,
Sarah; in the coorse o' time your heart will get so hardened that you'll
laugh at the world--ay, at all that's either bad or good in it, as I
do."

"I never wish to come to that state," she replied; "an' you never felt
what I feel--you never had that much of what was good in your heart.
No," she proceeded, "sooner than come to that state--that is, to your
state--I'd put this knife into my heart. You, father, never loved one of
your own kind yet."

"Didn't I?" he replied, while his eyes lightened into a glare like those
of a provoked tiger; "ay, I loved one of our kind--of your kind; loved
her--ay, an' was happy wid her--oh, how happy. Ah, Sarah M'Gowan, an'
I loved my fellow-creatures then, too, like a fool as I was: loved, ay,
loved; an' she that I so loved proved false to me--proved an adulteress;
an' I tell you now, that it may harden your heart against the world,
that that woman--my wife--that I so loved, an' that so disgraced me, was
your mother."

"It's a lie--it's as false as the devil himself," she replied, turning
round quickly, and looking him with frantic vehemence of manner in the
face. "My mother never did what you say. She's now in her grave, an'
c