screamed Rory, as the voice caught his ear. "Give me that crutch; let me
have one lick at him, for the love of Mary."

"They're all mad here, that's plain," said M'Caskey, turning away with
a contemptuous air. "Sir," added he, turning towards Skeff, "I have
the honor to salute you;" and with a magnificent bow he withdrew,
while Rory, in a voice of wildest passion and invective, called
down innumerable curses on his head, and inveighed even against the
bystanders for not securing the "greatest villain in Europe." "I shall
want to send a letter to Naples," cried out Skeff to the Colonel; "I
mean to remain here;" but M'Caskey never deigned to notice his words,
but walked proudly down the stairs, and went his way.

CHAPTER LVII. AT TONY'S BEDSIDE

My story draws to a close, and I have not space to tell how Skeff
watched beside his friend, rarely quitting him, and showing in a hundred
ways the resources of a kind and thoughtful nature. Tony had been
severely wounded; a sabre-cut had severed his scalp, and he had been
shot through the shoulder; but all apprehension of evil consequences
was now over, and he was able to listen to Skeff's wondrous tidings,
and hear all the details of his accession to wealth and fortune. His
mother--how she would rejoice at it! how happy it would make her!--not
for her own sake, but for his; how it would seem to repay to her all she
had suffered from the haughty estrangement of Sir Omerod, and how proud
she would be at the recognition, late though it came! These were Tony's
thoughts; and very often, when Skeflf imagined him to be following the
details of his property, and listening with eagerness to the description
of what he owned, Tony was far away in thought at the cottage beside the
Causeway, and longing ardently when he should sit at the window with his
mother at his side planning out some future in which they were to be no
more separated.

There was no elation at his sudden fortune, nor any of that anticipation
of indulgence which Skeff himself would have felt, and which he indeed
suggested. No. Tony's whole thoughts so much centred in his dear mother,
that she entered into all his projects; and there was not a picture of
enjoyment wherein she was not a foreground figure.

They would keep the cottage,--that was his first resolve: his mother
loved it dearly; it was associated with years long of happiness and of
trials too; and trials can endear a spot when they are nobly borne, and