; but most unfortunately,
before she had yet received the fatal gift, her eyes fell directly on
M'Guire; and no sooner had she seen the poor gentleman's face than she
screamed out and leaped backward, as though she had seen the devil.
Almost at the same moment a woman appeared upon the threshold of a
neighbouring shop, and called upon the child in anger. "Come here,
colleen," she said, "and don't be plaguing the poor old gentleman!" With
that she re-entered the house, and the child followed her, sobbing
aloud.

With the loss of this hope M'Guire's reason swooned within him. When
next he awoke to consciousness, he was standing before St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields, wavering like a drunken man; the passers-by
regarded him with eyes in which he read, as in a glass, an image of the
terror and horror that dwelt within his own.

"I am afraid you are very ill, sir," observed a woman, stopping and
gazing hard in his face. "Can I do anything to help you?"

"Ill?" said M'Guire. "O God!" And then, recovering some shadow of his
self-command, "Chronic, madam," said he: "a long course of the dumb
ague. But since you are so compassionate--an errand that I lack the
strength to carry out," he gasped--"this bag to Portman Square. O
compassionate woman, as you hope to be saved, as you are a mother, in
the name of your babes that wait to welcome you at home, oh, take this
bag to Portman Square! I have a mother, too," he added, with a broken
voice. "Number 19 Portman Square."

I suppose he had expressed himself with too much energy of voice; for
the woman was plainly taken with a certain fear of him. "Poor
gentleman!" said she. "If I were you, I would go home." And she left him
standing there in his distress.

"Home!" thought M'Guire, "what a derision!" What home was there for him,
the victim of philanthropy? He thought of his old mother, of his happy
youth; of the hideous, rending pang of the explosion; of the possibility
that he might not be killed, that he might be cruelly mangled, crippled
for life, condemned to life-long pains, blinded perhaps, and almost
surely deafened. Ah, you spoke lightly of the dynamiter's peril; but
even waiving death, have you realised what it is for a fine, brave young
man of forty, to be smitten suddenly with deafness, cut off from all the
music of life, and from the voice of friendship and love? How little do
we realise the sufferings of others! Even your brutal Government, in the
heyday of its lust for cr