“This, Mr. Hycy,” she replied, “is neither a time nor a place for empty compliments.  When the son becomes as worthy as the father, I’ll shake hands with him; but not till that time comes.”

On returning to the place she had left, her eyes met those of Bryan, and for a period that estimable and true-hearted young fellow forgot both grief and sorrow in the rush of rapturous love which poured its unalloyed sense of happiness into his heart.  Hycy, however, felt mortified, and bit his lip with vexation.  To a young man possessed of excessive vanity, the repulse was the more humiliating in proportion to its publicity.  Gerald Cavanagh was as deeply offended as Hycy, and his wife could not help exclaiming aloud, “Kathleen! what do you mane?  I declare I’m ashamed of you!”

Kathleen, however, sat down beside her sister, and the matter was soon forgotten in the stir and bustle which preceded the setting out of the funeral.

This was indeed a trying and heart-rending scene.  The faithful wife, the virtuous mother, the kind friend, and the pious Christian, was now about to be removed for ever from that domestic scene which her fidelity, her virtue, her charity, and her piety, had filled with peace, and love, and happiness.  As the coffin, which had been resting upon two chairs, was about to be removed, the grief of her family became loud and vehement.

“Oh, Bridget!” exclaimed her husband, “and is it to come to this at last!  And you are lavin’ us for evermore!  Don’t raise the coffin,” he proceeded, “don’t raise it.  Oh! let us not part wid her till to-morrow; let us know that she’s undher the same roof wid us until then.  An’, merciful Father, when I think where you’re goin’ to bring her to!  Oh! there lies the heart now widout one motion—­dead and cowld—­the heart that loved us all as no other heart ever did!  Bridget, my wife, don’t you hear me?  But the day was that you’d hear me, an’ that your kind an’ lovin’ eye would turn on me wid that smile that was never broken.  Where is the wife that was true?  Where is the lovin’ mother, the charitable heart to the poor and desolate, and the hand that was ever ready to aid them that was in distress?  Where are they all now?  There, dead and cowld forever, in that coffin.  What has become of my wife, I say?  What is death at all, to take all we love from us this way?  But sure God forgive me for saying so, for isn’t it the will of God? but oh! it is the heaviest of all thrials to lose such a woman as she was!”

Old grandfather, as he was called, had latterly become very feeble, and was barely able to be out of bed on that occasion.  When the tumult reached the room where he sat with some of the aged neighbors, he inquired what had occasioned it, and being told that the coffin was about to be removed to the hearse, he rose up.