“You are too much cast down,” she replied, her tears flowing fast, “an’ it can’t surely be otherwise; but, dear Con, let us hope for better days—­an’ put our trust in God’s goodness.”

“Farewell, dear Mave,” he replied, “an may God bless and presarve you till I see you again!”

“An’ may He send down aid to you all,” she added, “an’ give consolation to your breakin’ hearts!”

An embrace, long, tender, and mournful, accompanied their words, after which they separated in sorrow and in tears, and with but little hope of happiness on the path of life that lay before them.

CHAPTER XIX. —­ Hanlon Secures the Tobacco-box.—­Strange Scene at Midnight.

The hour so mysteriously appointed by Red Rody for the delivery of the Tobacco-box to Hanlon, was fast approaching, and the night though by no means so stormy as that which we have described on the occasion of that person’s first visit to the Grey Stone, was nevertheless dark and rainy, with an occasional slight gust of wind, that uttered a dreary and melancholy moan, as it swept over the hedges.  Hanlon, whose fear of supernatural appearances had not been diminished by what he had heard there before as well as on his way home, now felt alarmed at every gust of wind that went past him.  He hurried on, however, and kept his nerves as firmly set as his terrors would allow him, until he got upon the plain old road which led directly to the appointed place.  The remarkable interest which he had felt at an earlier stage of the circumstances that compose our narrative, was beginning to cool a little, when it was revived by his recent conversation with Red Rody concerning the Black Prophet, and the palpable contradictions in which he detected that person, with reference to the period when the Prophet came to reside in the neighborhood.  His anxiety therefore, about the Tobacco-box began, as he approached the Grey Stone, to balance his fears; so that by the time he arrived there, he found himself cooler and firmer a good deal than when he first crossed the dark fields from home.  Hanlon, in fact, had learned a good deal of the Prophet’s real character, from several of those who had never been duped by his impostures; and the fact of ascertaining that the very article so essential to the completion of his purpose, had been found in the Prophet’s house or possession, gave a fresh and still more powerful impulse to his determinations.  The night, we have already observed, was dark, and the heavy gloom which covered the sky was dismal and monotonous.  Several flashes of lightning, it is true, had shot out from the impervious masses of black clouds, that lay against each other overhead.  These, however, only added terror to the depression which such a night and such a sky were calculated to occasion.

“I trust,” thought Hanlon, as he approached the stone, “that there will be no disappointment, and that I won’t have my journey on sich a dark and dismal night for nothing.  How this red ruffian can have any authority over a girl like Sarah, is a puzzle that I can’t make out.”