“Wrong, father!” he replied, “all’s wrong, and I can’t understand it.  It’s wel for you that you don’t know the doom that’s upon us now, for I feel how it would bring you down, and how it will, too.  It will kill you, my father—­it will kill you.”

“Connor, come home, avick, come home—­I’m tired at any rate—­come home to you mother—­come, for her sake—­I know I’m not at home, an’ she’ll not rest till I bring you safe back to her.  Come now, I’ll have no put offs—­you must come, I say—­I ordher you—­I can’t and won’t meet her wid out you.  Come, avick, an’ you can sing mi the song goin’ home—­come wid your owi poor ould father, that can’t live widout you—­come, a sullish machree, I don’t feel right here—­we won’t be properly happy till we go to your lovin’ mother.”

“Father, father, you don’t know what you’re making me suffer!  What heart, blessed heaven, can bear—­”

The door of his cell here opened, and the turnkey stated that some five or six of his friends were anxious to see him, and, above all things, to take charge of his father to his own home.  This was a manifest relief to the young man, who then felt more deeply on his unhappy father’s account than on his own.

“Some foolish friends,” said he, “have given my father liquor, an’ it has got into his head—­indeed, it overcame him the more as I never remember him to taste a drop of spirits during his life before.  I can see no body now an’ him in this state; but if they wish me well, let them take care of him, and leave him safe at his own house, and tell them I’ll be glad if I can see them tomorrow, or any other time.”

With considerable difficulty Fardorougha was removed from Connor, whom he clung to with all his strength, attempting also to drag him away.  He then wept bitterly, because he declined to accompany him home, that he might comfort his mother, and enjoy the imagined recovery of his money from P——­e, and the conviction which he believed they had just succeeded in getting against that notorious defaulter.

After they had departed, Connor sat down upon his hard pallet, and, supporting his head with his hand, saw, for the first time, in all its magnitude and horror, the death to which he found himself now doomed.  The excitement occasioned by his trial, and his increasing firmness, as it darkened on through all its stages to the final sentence, now had—­in a considerable degree abandoned him, and left his heart, at present, more accessible to natural weakness than it it had been to the power of his own affections.  The image of his early-loved Una had seldom since his arrest been out of his imagination.  Her youth, her beauty, her wild but natural grace, and the flashing glances of her dark enthusiastic eye, when joined to her tenderness and boundless affection for himself—­all caused his heart to quiver with deadly anguish through every fibre.  This produced a transition to Flanagan—­the contemplation of whose perfidious vengeance made him spring from his seat in a paroxysm of indignant but intense hatred, so utterly furious that the swelling tempest which it sent through his veins caused him to reel with absolute giddiness.