“Well,” continued Alley, “it’s this—­Never call my mistress Lady Lucy, because she doesn’t like it.”

This was an apple from the shores of the Dead Sea.  Nancy’s face bore all the sudden traces of disappointment and mortification; and, from a principle of retaliation, she resolved to give her companion a morsel from the same fruit.

“Now, Nancy,” continued the former, “what’s this you have to tell us?”

“But you swear not to breathe it to man, woman, or child, boy or girl, rich or poor, livin’ or dead?”

“Sartainly I do.”

“Well, then, it’s this.  I understand that Docthor Scareman isn’t likely to have a family.  Now, ahagur, if you spake, I’m done, that’s all.”

Having been then called away to make arrangements necessary to Lucy’s. comfort, their dialogue was terminated before she could worm out of Alley the cause of her mistress’s visit.

“She’s a cunnin’ ould hag,” said the latter, when the other had gone.  “I see what she wants to get out o’ me; but it’s not for nothing Miss Lucy has trusted me, an’ I’m not the girl to betray her secrets to them that has no right to know them.”

This, indeed, was true.  Poor Alley Mahon, though a very neat and handsome girl, and of an appearance decidedly respectable, was nevertheless a good deal vulgar in her conversation.  In lieu of this, however, notwithstanding a large stock of vanity, she was gifted with a strong attachment to her mistress, and had exhibited many trying proofs of truthfulness and secrecy under circumstances where most females in her condition of life would have given way.  As a matter of course, she was obliged to receive her master’s bribes, otherwise she would have been instantly dismissed, as one who presumed to favor Lucy’s interest and oppose his own.  Her fertility of fancy, however, joined to deep-rooted affection for his daughter, enabled her to return as a recompense for Sir Thomas’s bribes, that description of one-sided truth which transfuses fiction into its own character and spirit, just as a drop or two of any coloring fluid will tinge a large portion of water with its own hue.  Her replies, therefore, when sifted and examined, always bore in them a sufficient portion of truth to enable her, on the strong point of veracity on which she boldly stood, to bear herself out with triumph; owing, indeed, to a slight dash in her defence of the coloring we have described.  Lucy felt that the agitation of mind, or rather, we should say, the agony of spirit which she had been of late forced to struggle with, had affected her health more than she could have anticipated.  That and the unusual fatigue of a long journey in a night coach, eked out by a jolting drive to Wicklow at a time when she required refreshment and rest, told upon her constitution, although a naturally healthy one.  For the next three or four days after her arrival at Summerfield Cottage, she experienced symptoms of slight fever, apparently nervous.  Every attention