tting on
the road with Florian's head on her lap, and the other kneeling and
holding the boy's hands. "Oh, yer honour! sorrow a taste in life do
we know about it," said the kneeling girl.

"Not a sight did we see, or a sound did we hear," said the other,
"only the going off of the blunderbuss. Oh, wirra shure! oh, musha,
musha! and it's dead he is, the darling boy." Mr. Jones came round
and picked up poor Florian and laid him on the car. The bullet had
gone true to its mark and had buried itself in his brain. There was
the end of poor Florian Jones and all his troubles. The father did
not say a word, not even in reply to Peter's wailings or to the
girls' easy sorrow; but, taking the rein in his own hands, drove the
car with the body on it back to Carnlough.

We can hardly analyse the father's mind as he went. Not a tear came
to his relief. Nor during this half hour can he hardly have been said
to sorrow. An intensity of wrath filled his breast. He had spent his
time for many a long year in doing all in his power for those around
him, and now they had brought him to this. They had robbed him of his
boy's heart. They had taught his boy to be one of them, and to be
untrue to his own people. And now, because he had yielded to better
teachings, they had murdered him. They had taught his boy to be a
coward; for even in his bereavement he remembered poor Florian's
failing. The accursed Papist people were all cowards down to their
backbones. So he said of them in his rage. There was not one of
them who could look any peril in the face as did Yorke Clayton or
his son Frank. But they were terribly powerful in their wretched
want of manliness. They could murder, and were protected in their
bloodthirstiness one by another. He did not doubt but that those
two girls who were wailing on the road knew well enough who was the
murderer, but no one would tell in this accursed, unhallowed, godless
country. The honour and honesty of one man did not, in these days,
prompt another to abstain from vice. The only heroism left in the
country was the heroism of mystery, of secret bloodshed and of hidden
attacks.

He had driven back methodically to Carnlough gates, but he hesitated
to carry his burden up to the hall-door. Would it not be better for
him at once to go home, and there to endure the suffering that was
in store for him? But he remembered that it would behove him to take
what steps might be possible for tracing the murderer. That by