noble specimen of manly beauty, now shrunk
away into an expression of gaunt and haggard wildness, that was painful
to contemplate. His sisters could not restrain their tears, on looking
at the wreck that was before them; and his mother, with a voice of deep
anguish, exclaimed--

"My brave, my beautiful boy, what, oh, what has become of you? Oh,
Tom, Tom," she added--"maybe it's well for you that you don't know the
breakin' hearts that's about you this night--or the bitter fate that's
over him that loved you so well."

As they turned him about, to take off his cravat, he suddenly raised his
head, and looking about him, asked--

"Where's my father gone?--I see you all about me but him--where's my
fath--"

Ere the words were pronounced, however, he was once more asleep, and
free for a time from the wild and moody malady which oppressed him.

Such was the night, and such were the circumstances and feelings that
ushered in the fearful day of Condy Dalton's trial.

CHAPTER XXIX. -- A Picture of the Present--Sarah Breaks her Word.

The gray of a cold frosty morning had begun to dawn, and the angry
red of the eastern sky gradually to change into that dim but darkening
aspect which marks a coming tempest of snow, when the parish priest,
the Rev. Father Hanratty, accompanied by Nelly M'Gowan, passed along the
Ballynafail road, on their way to the Grange, for the purpose of having
a communication with Charley Hanlon. It would, indeed, be impossible
to describe a morning more strongly marked than the one in question,
by that cold and shivering impression of utter misery which it is
calculated to leave on any mind, especially when associated with the
sufferings of our people. The breeze was keen and so cutting, that
one felt as if that part of the person exposed to it had undergone the
process of excoriation, and when a stronger blast than usual swept over
the naked and desolate-looking fields, its influence actually benumbed
the joints, and penetrated the whole system with a sensation that made
one imagine the very marrow within the bones was frozen.

They had not proceeded far beyond the miserable shed where Sarah, in the
rapid prostration of typhus, had been forced to take shelter, when, in
passing a wretched cabin by the roadside, which, from its open door and
ruinous windows, had all the appearance of being uninhabited, they heard
the moans of some unhappy individual within, accompanied, as it were,
with somet