His two male companions filled their glasses, and joined him heartily.  O’Donegan shook him by the hand, so did Corbet, and they now could understand the cause of his very natural elevation of spirits.

“So you have all got legacies,” proceeded Mr. Ambrose; “fifty pounds apiece, I hear, by the death of your brother, Mr. Corbet, who was steward to Lady Gourlay—­I am delighted to hear it—­hip, hip, hurra, again.”

“It’s true enough,” observed the prophetess, “a good, kind-hearted man was my poor brother Edward.”

“How is that old scoundrel of a Black Baronet in your neighborhood—­Sir Thomas—­he who murdered his brother’s heir?”

“For God’s sake, Mr. Ambrose, don’t say so.  Don’t you know that he got heavy damages against Captain Furlong for using the same words?”

“He be hanged,” said the tipsy student; “he murdered him as sure as I sit at this table; and God bless the worthy, be the same man or woman, who left himself, as he left his brother’s widow, without an heir to his ill-gotten title and property.”

The fortune-teller rose up, and entreated him not to speak harshly against Sir Thomas Gourlay, adding, “That, perhaps, he was not so bad as the people supposed; but,” she added, “as they—­that is, she and her brother—­happened to be in town, they were anxious to see him (the student); and, indeed, they would feel obliged if he came with them into the front room for ten minutes or so, as they wished to have a little private conversation with him.”

The change in his features at this intimation was indeed surprising.  A keen, sharp sense of self-possession, an instant recollection of his position and circumstances, banished from them, almost in an instant, the somewhat careless and tipsy expression which they possessed on his entrance.

“Certainly,” said he—­“Mr. O’Donegan, will you take care of yourself until we return?”

“No doubt of it,” replied the pedagogue, as they left the room, “I shall not forget myself, no more than that the image and superscription of Sir Thomas Gourlay, the Black Baronet, is upon your diabolical visage.”

Instead of ten minutes, the conference between the parties in the next room lasted for more than an hour, during which period O’Donegan did not omit to take care of himself, as he said.  The worthy pedagogue was one of those men, who, from long habit, can never become tipsy beyond a certain degree of elevation, after which, no matter what may be the extent of their indulgence, nothing in the shape of liquor can affect them.  When Gray and his two friends returned, they found consequently nothing but empty bottles before them, whilst the schoolmaster viewed them with a kind of indescribable steadiness of countenance, which could not be exactly classed with either drunkenness or sobriety, but was something between both.  More liquor, however, was ordered in, but, in the meantime, O’Donegan’s eyes were fastened