“I’ll sleep in his bed,” replied the husband; “on the very spot he lay on I’ll he.”

This was, indeed, trenching, and selfishly trenching upon the last mournful privilege of the mother’s heart.  Her sleeping here was one of those secret but melancholy enjoyments, which the love of a mother or of a wife will often steal, like a miser’s theft, from the very hoard of their own sorrows.  In fact, she was not prepared for this, and when he spoke she looked at him for some time in silent amazement.

“Oh, no, Fardorougha dear,the mother, the mother, that her breast was so often his pillow, has the best right, now that he’s gone, to lay her head where his lay.  Oh, for Heaven’s sake, lave that poor pleasure to me, Fardorougha!”

“No, Honor, you can bear up undher grief better than I can.  I must sleep where my boy slept.”

“Fardorougha, I could go upon my knees! to you, an’ I will, avourneen, if you’ll grant me this.”

“I can’t, I can’t,” he replied, distractedly; “I could sleep nowhere else.  I love everything belongin’ to him.  I can’t, Honor, I can’t, I can’t.”

“Fardorougha, my heart—­his mother’s heart is fixed upon it, an’ was.  Oh lave this to me, acushla, lave this to me—­it’s all I axe!”

“I couldn’t, I couldn’t—­my heart is breakin’—­it’ll be sweet to me—­I’ll think I’ll be nearer him,” and as he uttered these words the tears flowed copiously down his cheeks.

His affectionate wife was touched with compassion, and immediately resolved to let him have his way, whatever it might cost herself.  “God pity you,” she said; “I’ll give it up, I’ll give it up, Fardorougha.  Do sleep where he slep’; I can’t blame you, nor I don’t; for sure it’s only a proof of how much you love him.”  She then bade him good—­night, and, with spirits dreadfully weighed down by this singular incident, withdrew to her lonely pillow; for Connor’s bed had been a single one, in which, of course, two persons could not sleep together.  Thus did these bereaved parents retire to seek that rest which nothing but exhausted nature seemed disposed to give them, until at length they fell asleep under the double shadow of night and a calamity which filled their hearts with so much distress and misery.

In the mean time, whatever these two families might have felt for the sufferings of their respective children in consequence of Bartle Flanagan’s villainy, that plausible traitor had watched the departure of his victim with a palpitating anxiety almost equal to what some unhappy culprit, in the dock of a prison, would experience when the foreman of his jury handed down the sentence which is either to hang or acquit him.  Up to the very moment on which the vessel sailed, his cruel but cowardly heart was literally sick with the apprehension that Connor’s mitigated sentence might be still further commuted to a term of imprisonment.  Great, therefore, was his joy, and boundless his exultation on satisfying himself