ars of
pity.

That night the poor man died, and the Fitzgeralds who sat in the
chambers of Castle Richmond were no longer the owners of the mansion.
There was no speech of Sir Herbert among the servants as there would
have been had these tidings not have reached them. Dr. Finucane had
remained in the house, and even he, in speaking of the son, had shown
that he knew the story. They were strangers there now, as they all
knew--intruders, as they would soon be considered in the house of
their cousin Owen; or rather not their cousin. In that he was above
them by right of his blood, they had no right to claim him as their
relation.

It may be said that at such a moment all this should not have been
thought of; but those who say so know little, as I imagine, of the
true effect of sorrow. No wife and no children ever grieved more
heartily for a father; but their grief was blacker and more gloomy in
that they knew that they were outcasts in the world.

And during that long night as Herbert and his sisters sat up cowering
round the fire, he told them of all that had been said at Hap House.
"And can it not be as he says?" Mary had asked.

"And that Herbert should give up his wife!" said Emmeline.

"No; but that other thing."

"Do not dream of it," said Herbert. "It is all, all impossible. The
house that we are now in belongs to Sir Owen Fitzgerald."

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE FIRST MONTH.

And now I will beg my readers to suppose a month to have passed by
since Sir Thomas Fitzgerald died. It was a busy month in Ireland.
It may probably be said that so large a sum of money had never been
circulated in the country in any one month since money had been known
there; and yet it may also be said that so frightful a mortality had
never occurred there from the want of that which money brings. It was
well understood by all men now that the customary food of the country
had disappeared. There was no longer any difference of opinion
between rich and poor, between Protestant and Roman Catholic; as to
that, no man dared now to say that the poor, if left to themselves,
could feed themselves, or to allege that the sufferings of the
country arose from the machinations of money-making speculators. The
famine was an established fact, and all men knew that it was God's
doing,--all men knew this, though few could recognize as yet with how
much mercy God's hand was stretched out over the country.

Or may it not perhaps be truer to say