o stupendous, that in a moment he had changed all. The sunshine lost
its warmth and grew pale, the hills lost their colour and their beauty,
as he reflected that he might never see the one or the other again,
might never return by that lake-side road by which he had come; as he
remembered that all his plans for his aggrandisement, and they were
many and clever, might end this day, this morning, this hour! Life! It
was that, it was all, it was the future, with its pleasures, hopes,
ambitions, that he had staked. And the stake was down. He could not now
take it up. It might well be, for the odds were great against him, that
it was to this day that all his life had led up; that life by which men
would by-and-by judge him, recalling this and that, this chicane and
that extortion, thanking God that he was dead, or perhaps one here and
there shrugging his shoulders in good-natured regret.

From the hedge-school in which he had first grasped the clue-line of
his life, to the day when his father had encouraged him to "turn
Protestant," that he might the better exploit his Papist neighbours,
ay, and forward to this day on which, at the bidding of a woman, he had
given the lie to his instincts, his training, and his education--from
the one to the other he saw his life stretched out before him! And he
could have cried upon his folly. Yet for that woman----"

"Faith, Mr. Asgill," cried a voice in his ear, "it's if you're ill, the
Major's asking. And, by the power, it's not very well you're looking
this day!"

Asgill eyed the interrupter--it was Morty O'Beirne--with a sternness
which his pallor made more striking. "I am coming," he said, "I am
going to fight him."

"The devil you are!" the young man answered. "Now, are you meaning?
This morning that ever is?"

"Ay, now. Where is----"

He stopped on the word, and was silent. Instead, he looked across the
courtyard in the direction of the house. If he might see her again. If
he might speak to her. But, no. Yet--was it certain that she knew? That
she understood? And if she understood, would she know that he had gone
to the meeting well-nigh without hope, aware against what skill he
pitted himself, and how large, how very large were the odds against
him?

"But, faith, and it's no jest fighting him, if the least bit in life of
what I've heard be true!" Morty said, a cloud on his face. He looked
uncertainly from Asgill to the house and back. "Is it to be doing
anything you want m