“I agree with you, Nannie, it might be only a long life of suffering; but I wouldn’t wish to see my father hanged.”

“Do you know,” said Nannie, relapsing into a deeper mood of her mania,—­“do you know that when I saw my father last he wouldn’t nor didn’t spake to me?  The house was filled with people, and my little brother Frank—­why now isn’t it strange that I feel somehow as if I will never wash his face again nor comb his white head in order to prepare him for mass?—­but whisper, Grace, sure then I was innocent and had not met the destroyer.”

The two unhappy girls looked at each other, and if ever there was a gaze calculated to wring the human heart with anguish and with pity, it was that gaze.  Both of them were, although unconsciously, on the very eve of dissolution, and it would seem as if a kind of presentiment of death had seized upon both at the same time.

“Nannie,” said Grace, “do you know that I’m afeard we’re both goin’ to die?”

“And why are you afeard of it?” asked Nannie.  “Many a time I would ’a given the world to die.”

“Why,” replied Grace, who saw the deep shadows of death upon her wild, pale, but still beautiful countenance,—­“why Nannie, you have your wish—­you are dying this moment.”

Just as Grace spoke the unfortunate girl seemed as if she had been stricken by a spasm of the heart.  She gave a slight start—­turned up her beautiful, but melancholy eyes to heaven, and exclaimed, as if conscious of the moment that had come,—­

“Forgive me, O God!” after which she laid herself calmly down by the side of Grace and expired.  Grace, by an effort, put her hand out and felt her heart, but there was no pulsation there—­it did not beat, and she saw by the utter lifelessness of her features that she was dead, and had been relieved at last from all her sorrows.

“Nannie,” she said, “your start before me won’t be long.  I do not wish to live to show a shamed face and a ruined character to my family and the world.  Nannie, I am coming; but where is my child?  Where is that woman who took it away?  My child!  Where is my child?”

Whilst this melancholy scene was taking place, another of a very different description was occurring near the cottage.  Two poachers, who were concealed in a hazel copse on the brow of a little glen beside it, saw a woman advance with an infant, which, by its cries, they felt satisfied was but newly born.

Its cries, however, were soon stilled, and they saw her deposit it in a little grave which had evidently been prepared for it.  She had covered it slightly with a portion of clay, but ere she had time to proceed further they pounced upon her.

“Hould her fast,” said one of them, “she has murdered the infant.  At all events, take it up, and I will keep her safe.”

This was done, and a handkerchief, the one with which she had strangled it, was found tightly tied about its neck.  That she was the instrument of Woodward in this terrible act, who can doubt?  In the meantime both she and the dead body of the child were brought back to Rathfillan, where, upon their evidence, he was at once committed to prison, the handkerchief having been kept as a testimony against him, for it was at once discovered to be her own property.