Miss Hickey: that I admire all that is admirable in you is
but to say that I have a sense of the beautiful. To say that I love
you would be mere profanity. Mr. Langan: I have in my pocket a loaded
pistol which I carry from a silly English prejudice against your
countrymen. Had I been the Hercules of the ploughtail, and you in my
place, I should have been a dead man now. Do not redden: you are safe
as far as I am concerned."

"Let me tell you before you leave my house for good," said Father
Hickey, who seemed to have become unreasonably angry, "that you should
never have crossed my threshold if I had known you were a spy: no, not
if your uncle were his Holiness the Pope himself."

Here a frightful thing happened to me. I felt giddy, and put my hand
on my head. Three warm drops trickled over it. I instantly became
murderous. My mouth filled with blood; my eyes were blinded with it.
My hand went involuntarily to the pistol. It is my habit to obey my
impulses instantaneously. Fortunately the impulse to kill vanished
before a sudden perception of how I might miraculously humble the mad
vanity in which these foolish people had turned upon me. The blood
receded from my ears; and I again heard and saw distinctly.

"And let me tell you," Langan was saying, "that if you think yourself
handier with cold lead than you are with your fists, I'll exchange
shots with you, and welcome, whenever you please. Father Tom's credit
is the same to me as my own; and if you say a word against it, you
lie."

"His credit is in my hands," I said, "I am the Cardinal's witness. Do
you defy me?"

"There is the door," said the priest, holding it open before me.
"Until you can undo the visible work of God's hand your testimony can
do no harm to me."

"Father Hickey," I replied, "before the sun rises again upon Four Mile
Water, I will undo the visible work of God's hand, and bring the
pointing finger of the scoffer upon your altar."

I bowed to Kate, and walked out. It was so dark that I could not at
first see the garden gate. Before I found it, I heard through the
window Father Hickey's voice, saying, "I wouldn't for ten pounds that
this had happened, Phil. He's as mad as a march hare. The Cardinal
told me so."

I returned to my lodging, and took a cold bath to cleanse the blood
from my neck and shoulder. The effect of the blow I had received was
so severe, that even after the bath and a light meal I felt giddy and
languid. There was an alaru