Reilly started, and after a pause, in which he took it for granted that Mary spoke merely from one of those shrewd conjectures which practised impostors are so frequently in the habit of hazarding, replied, “That won’t do, Mary; you have told me nothing yet that has happened within the last forty-eight hours.  I deny the truth of what you say.”

“It won’t be long so, then, Mr. Reilly; you saved the life of the old half-mad squire of Corbo.  Yes, you saved his life, and you have taken his daughter’s! for indeed it would be better for her to die at wanst than to suffer what will happen to you and her.”

“Why, what is to happen?”

“You’ll know it too soon,” she replied, “and there’s no use in making you unhappy.  Good-by, Mr. Reilly; if you take a friend’s advice you’ll give her up; think no more of her.  It may cost you an aching heart to do so, but by doin’ it you may save her from a great deal of sorrow, and both of you from a long and heavy term of suffering.”

Reilly, though a young man of strong reason in the ordinary affairs of life, and of a highly cultivated intellect besides, yet felt himself influenced by the gloomy forebodings of this notorious woman.  It is true he saw, by the force of his own sagacity, that she had uttered nothing which any person acquainted with the relative position of himself and Cooleen Bawn, and the political circumstances of the country, might not have inferred as a natural and probable consequence.  In fact he had, on his way home, arrived at nearly the same conclusion.  Marriage, as the laws of the country then stood, was out of the question, and could not be legitimately effected.  What, then, must the consequence of this irresistible but ill-fated passion be?  An elopement to the Continent would not only be difficult but dangerous, if not altogether impossible.  It was obviously evident that Mary Mahon had drawn her predictions from the same circumstances which led himself to similar conclusions; yet, notwithstanding all this, he felt that her words had thrown a foreshadowing of calamity and sorrow over his spirit, and he passed up to his own house in deep gloom and heaviness of heart.  It is true he remembered that this same Mary Mahon belonged to a family that had been inimical to his house.  She was a woman who had, in her early life, been degraded by crime, the remembrance of which had been by no means forgotten.  She was, besides, a paramour to the Red Rapparee, and he attributed much of her dark and ill-boding prophecy to a hostile and malignant spirit.

On the evening of the same day, probably about the same hour, the old squire having recruited himself by sleep, and felt refreshed and invigorated, sent for his daughter to sit with him as was her wont; for indeed, as the reader may now fully understand, his happiness altogether depended upon her society, and those tender attentions to him which constituted the chief solace of his life.