“Thank you, Mogue, for thinking of this—­you are a considerate kind fellow, and I cordially admit that I owe my life to you this day.  Had you not been with me I must have lost my way and perished in the mountains.”

Mogue and Finnerty exchanged glances, which, however, did not escape the observation of the wife, who thoroughly understood those changes of expression, which reflected her husband’s darker and sterner purposes.

“Why, then, Misther Frank, that I may be happy but I am glad I was with you, so I am, for indeed only for me I don’t think, sure enough, that ever you’d see this house to-night.  There’s some spirits left here still, and as I’m for another stretch, I don’t think a glass of it will do me, or for that matther, Frank Finnerty here, any harm.  You can see me down the hills a piece, Frank; and you, Mr. Francis, might throw yourself on the bed a while, and get an hour’s sleep or so.”

This too was agreed to—­Mogue and Finnerty took each a glass of whiskey, as did Mrs. Finnerty, by permission of her husband, and in a few minutes she and M’Carthy were left by themselves.

After the two worthies had been gone a few minutes, she proceeded to the door, and as the night had now become tolerably light, she looked out, but with a great deal of caution.  At first she saw no person, but in walking in the shadow of the house, along! the sidewall to the left, she was able to observe five or six persons coming towards her husband and Moylan in a body; she saw that they stopped and were in close conversation, pointing frequently towards the house as they spoke.  She returned to M’Carthy with the same caution, and, approaching him, was about to speak, when dread of her husband supervened for the moment, and she paused like a person in doubt.  The peculiar glare and the satanic smile which her husband gave to Mogue, who, by the way, seemed perfectly to understand it, oppressed her with an indistinct sense of approaching evil which she could neither shake off, nor separate from the strange gentleman to whom their glances evidently referred.  She remembered also to have heard her husband say upon one occasion when he was drunk, that Mogue Moylan was the deepest villain in the barony—­ay, or in the kingdom; and that only for his cowardice he would be a man after his own heart.  ’Twas true, she knew that he had contradicted all this afterwards when he got sober, and said it was the liquor that caused him to speak as he did, that Mogue was a good kind-hearted crature, who loved truth, and was one of the most religious boys among them.

This, however, did not satisfy her; the impression of some meditated evil against their temporary guest was too strong to be disregarded, and on recollecting that Mogue had been up with her husband only the evening but one before, as if to prepare him for something unusual, the conviction arose to an alarming height.