“But there is one thing that I still cannot understand,” replied the baronet, “which is, that the disappearance of Miss Gourlay was never mentioned to me until I inquired for her maid, whom I wished to speak with.”

“But sure that’s very natural, sir,” replied Nancy; “the reason we didn’t speak to you upon the subject was because we thought that it was your honor who brought her away; and that as you took such a late hour in the night for it, you didn’t wish that we should know anything about it.”

The baronet’s eye fell upon her severely, as if he doubted the truth of what she said.  Nancy’s eye, however, neither avoided his nor quailed before it.  She now spoke the truth, and she did so, in order to prevent herself and the other servants from incurring his resentment by their silence.

“Very well,” observed Sir Thomas, calmly, but sternly.  “I think you have spoken what you believe to be the truth, and what, for all you know, may be the truth.  But observe my words:  let this subject be never breathed nor uttered by any domestic in my establishment.  Tell your fellow-servants that such are my orders; for I swear, if I find that any one of you shall speak of it, my utmost vengeance shall pursue him or her to death itself.  That will do.”  And he signed to her to retire.

CHAPTER XVIII.  Dunphy visits the County Wicklow

—­Old Sam and his Wife.

It was about a week subsequent to the interview which the stranger had with old Dunphy, unsuccessful as our readers know it to have been, that the latter and his wife were sitting in the back parlor one night after their little shop had been closed, when the following dialogue took place between them: 

“Well, at all events,” observed the old man, “he was the best of them, and to my own knowledge that same saicret lay hot and heavy on his conscience, especially to so good a master and mistress as they were to him.  The truth is, Polly, I’ll do it.”

“But why didn’t he do it himself?” asked his wife.

“Why?—­why?” he replied, looking at her with his keen ferret eyes—­“why, don’t you know what a weak-minded, timorsome creature he was, ever since the height o’ my knee?”

“Oh, ay,” she returned; “and I hard something about an oath, I think, that they made him take.”

“You did,” said her husband; “and it was true, too.  They swore him never to breathe a syllable of it until his dying day—­an’ although they meant by that that he should never reveal it at all, yet he always was of opinion that he might tell it on that day, but on no other one.  And it was his intention to do so.”

“Wasn’t it an unlucky thing that she happened to be out when he could do it with a safe conscience?” observed his wife.

“They almost threatened the life out of the poor creature,” pursued her husband, “for Tom threatened to murder him if he betrayed them; and Ginty to poison him, if Tom didn’t keep his word—­and I believe in my sowl that the same devil’s pair would a’ done either the one or the other, if he had broken his oath.  Of the two, however, Ginty’s the worst, I think; and I often believe, myself, that she deals with the devil; but that, I suppose, is bekaise she’s sometimes not right in her head still.”