Thomas Dalton as might be expected, swayed by the capricious impulse of his unhappy derangement, did not accompany her to his father’s cabin.  When within a few hundred yards of it, he changed his intention, and struck across the country like one who seemed uncertain as to the course he should take.  Of late, indeed, he rambled about, sometimes directing, otherwise associating himself with, such mobs as we have described; sometimes wandering, in a solitary manner, through the country at large; and but seldom appearing at home.  On the present occasion, he looked at Mave, and said: 

“I hate sick people, Mave, an’ I won’t go home; but, whisper, when you see Peggy Murtagh’s father, tell him that I’ll have her in a coach, yet, plaise God, an’ he’ll take the curse off o’ me, when he hears it, maybe, an’ all will be right.”

He then bid her good-bye, turned from the road, and bent his steps in the direction of the Rabbit Bank, on one of the beeches of which he had intended to hang the miser.

CHAPTER XXIV. —­ Rivalry.

If the truth were known, the triumph which Mave Sullivan achieved over the terror of fever which she felt in common with almost every one in the country around her, was the result of such high-minded devotion, as would have won her a statue in the times of old Greece, when self-sacrifice for human good was appreciated and rewarded.  In her case, indeed, the triumph was one of almost unparalleled heroism; for among all the difficulties which she had to overcome, by far the greatest was her own constitutional dread of contagion.  It was only on reaching the miserable pest-house in which the Daltons lived, and on witnessing, with her own eyes, the clammy atmosphere which, in the shape of dark heavy smoke, was oozing in all directions from its roof, that she became conscious of the almost fatal step that she was about to take, and the terrible test of Christian duty and exalted affection, to which she was in the act of subjecting herself.

On arriving at the door, and when about to enter, even the resolution she had come to, and the lofty principle of trust in God, on which it rested, were scarcely able to support her against the host of constitutional terrors, which, for a moment, rushed upon her breast.  The great act of self-sacrifice, as it may almost be termed, which she was about to perform, became so diminished in her imagination, that all sense of its virtue passed away; and instead of gaining strength from a consciousness of the pure and unselfish motive by which she was actuated, she began to contemplate her conduct as the result of a rash and unjustifiable presumption on the providence of God, and a wanton exposure of the life he had given her.  She felt herself tremble; her heart palpitated, and for a minute or two her whole soul became filled with a tumultuous and indistinct! perception of all she had proposed to do, as well as of everything about her.  Gradually, however, his state of feeling cleared away—­by and by the purity and Christian principle that were involved in her conduct, came to her relief.