“I ought to have known it all.”

“You knew all that she knew;—­all that I knew.  You knew all that her mother knew.  No, Lord Scroope.  It cannot be that you should be so unutterably a villain.  You are your own masther.  Unsay what you have said to me, and her ears shall never be wounded or her heart broken by a hint of it.”

“I cannot make her Countess of Scroope.  You are a priest, and can use what words you please to me;—­but I cannot make her Countess of Scroope.”

“Faith,—­and there will be more than words used, my young lord.  As to your plot of a counterfeit marriage,—­”

“I said nothing of a counterfeit marriage.”

“What was it you said, then?  I say you did.  You proposed to me,—­to me a priest of God’s altar,—­a false counterfeit marriage, so that those two poor women, who you are afraid to face, might be cajoled and chaited and ruined.”

“I am going to face them instantly.”

“Then must your heart be made of very stone.  Shall I tell you the consequences?” Then the priest paused awhile, and the young man, bursting into tears, hid his face against the wall.  “I will tell you the consequences, Lord Scroope.  They will die.  The shame and sorrow which you have brought on them, will bring them to their graves,—­and so there will be an end of their throubles upon earth.  But while I live there shall be no rest for the sole of your foot.  I am ould, and may soon be below the sod, but I will lave it as a legacy behind me that your iniquity shall be proclaimed and made known in high places.  While I live I will follow you, and when I am gone there shall be another to take the work.  My curse shall rest on you,—­the curse of a man of God, and you shall be accursed.  Now, if it suits you, you can go up to them at Ardkill and tell them your story.  She is waiting to receive her lover.  You can go to her, and stab her to the heart at once.  Go, sir!  Unless you can change all this and alter your heart even as you hear my words, you are unfit to find shelter beneath my roof.”

Having so spoken, waiting to see the effect of his indignation, the priest went out, and got upon his horse, and went away upon his journey.  The young lord knew that he had been insulted, was aware that words had been said to him so severe that one man, in his rank of life, rarely utters them to another; and he had stood the while with his face turned to the wall speechless and sobbing!  The priest had gone, telling him to leave the house because his presence disgraced it; and he had made no answer.  Yet he was the Earl of Scroope,—­the thirteenth Earl of Scroope,—­a man in his own country full of honours.  Why had he come there to be called a villain?  And why was the world so hard upon him that on hearing himself so called he could only weep like a girl?  Had he done worse than other men?  Was he not willing to make any retribution for his fault,—­except by doing that which he had been taught to think would be a greater fault?