from the cottage. Lady Mary had said in her letter to her
friend that Mrs. O'Hara was a lady;--and as Mrs. O'Hara had no other
neighbour, ranking with herself in that respect, so near her, and none
other but the Protestant clergyman's wife within six miles of her,
charity, one would have thought, might have induced some of the Quin
family to notice her. But the Quins were Protestant, and Mrs. O'Hara was
not only a Roman Catholic, but a Roman Catholic who had been brought
into the parish by the priest. No evil certainly was known of her, but
then nothing was known of her; and the Quins were a very cautious people
where religion was called in question. In the days of the famine Father
Marty and the Earl and the Protestant vicar had worked together in the
good cause;--but those days were now gone by, and the strange intimacy
had soon died away. The Earl when he met the priest would bow to him,
and the two clergymen would bow to each other;--but beyond such dumb
salutation there was no intercourse between them. It had been held
therefore to be impossible to take any notice of the priest's friends.

And what notice could have been taken of two ladies who came from nobody
knew where, to live in that wild out-of-the-way place, nobody knew why?
They called themselves mother and daughter, and they called themselves
O'Haras;--but there was no evidence of the truth even of these
assertions. They were left therefore in their solitude, and never saw
the face of a friend across their door step except that of Father Marty.

In truth Mrs. O'Hara's life had been of a nature almost to necessitate
such solitude. With her story we have nothing to do here. For our
purpose there is no need that her tale should be told. Suffice it to say
that she had been deserted by her husband, and did not now know whether
she was or was not a widow. This was in truth the only mystery attached
to her. She herself was an Englishwoman, though a Catholic; but she had
been left early an orphan, and had been brought up in a provincial town
of France by her grandmother. There she had married a certain Captain
O'Hara, she having some small means of her own sufficient to make her
valuable in the eyes of an adventurer. At that time she was no more
than eighteen, and had given her hand to the Captain in opposition to
the wishes of her only guardian. What had been her life from that time
to the period at which, under Father Marty's auspices, she became the
inhabitant