. The McMurrough, the Squireens, Sir Donny,
and Burke, secretly uneasy, put on a reckless air to cover their
apprehensions. The Bishop and Cammock, though they saw themselves in a
fair way to do what they had come to do, looked thoughtful also. And
only Flavia--only Flavia, shaking off the remembrance of Colonel John's
face, and Colonel John's existence--closed her grip upon his sword, and
in the ardour of her patriotism saw with her mind's eye not victory nor
acclaiming thousands--no, nor the leaping line of pikemen charging for
_his_ glory that her brother saw--but the scaffold, and a death for her
country. Sweet it seemed to her to die for the cause, for the faith, to
die for Ireland! To die as young Lord Derwentwater had died a year or
two before; as Lady Nithsdale had been ready to die; as innumerable men
and women had died, lifted above common things by the love of their
country.

True, her country, her Ireland, was but this little corner of Kerry
beaten by the Atlantic storms and sad with the wailing cries of
seagulls; the rudest province of a land itself provincial. But if she
knew no more of Ireland than this, she had read her story; and naught
is more true than that the land the most down-trodden is also the best
beloved. Wrongs beget a passion of affection; and from oppression
springs sacrifice. This daughter of the windswept shore, of the misty
hills and fairy glens, whose life from infancy had been bare and rugged
and solitary, had become, for that reason, a dreamer of dreams and a
worshipper of the ideal Ireland, her country, her faith. The salt
breeze that lashed her cheeks and tore at her hair, the peat reek and
the soft shadows of the bogland--ay, and many an hour of lonely
communing--had filled her breast with love; such love as impels rather
to suffering and to sacrifice than to enjoyment. Nor had she yet
encountered the inevitable disappointments. Her eyes had not yet been
opened to the seamy side of patriotism; to the sordid view of every
great adventure that soon or late saddens the experienced and dispels
the glamour of the dreamer.

For one moment she had recoiled before the shock of impending violence,
the clash of steel, the reality of things. But that had passed; now her
one thought, as she stood with dilated eyes, unconsciously clutching
the Colonel's sword, was that the time was come, the thing was
begun--henceforth she belonged not to herself, but to Ireland and to
God.

Deep in such th