‘Stop, mother,’ sobbed Nan, drawing her back by the arm; ’don’t you see the lady’s sick.’

‘No—­no—­not anything; only—­only shocked,’ said poor Lilias, as white as marble, and speaking almost in a whisper; ’but I can’t say Captain Devereux ever spoke to me in the way you suppose, that’s all.  I’ve no more to say.’

Nan Glynn, sobbing and with her apron still to her eyes, was gliding to the door, but her mother looked, with a coarse sort of cunning in her eye, steadily at the poor young lady, in some sort her victim, and added more sternly—­

’Well, my lady, ‘tis proud I am to hear it, an’ there’s no harm done, at any rate; an’ I thought ’twas only right I should tell you the thruth, and give you this warnin’, my lady; an’ here’s the atturney’s writin’, Ma’am—­if you’ll plaze to read it—­Mr. Bagshot, iv Thomas Street—­sayin’, if you’ll be plazed to look at it—­that ’tis a good marriage, an’ that if he marries any other woman, gentle or simple, he’ll take the law iv him in my daughter’s cause, the black, parjured villian, an’ transport him, with a burnt hand, for bigamany; an’ ’twas only right, my lady, as the townspeople was talking, as if it was as how he was thryin’ to invagle you, Miss, the desaver, for he’d charrum the birds off the trees, the parjurer; and I’ll tell his raverence all about it when I see him, in the morning—­for ’tis only right he should know.  Wish the lady good-night, Nan, you slut—­an the same from myself, Ma’am.’

And, with another courtesy, the Glynns of Palmerstown withdrew.

CHAPTER XL.

OF A MESSENGER FROM CHAPELIZOD VAULT WHO WAITED IN THE TYLED HOUSE FOR MR. MERVYN.

Mervyn was just about this time walking up the steep Ballyfermot Road.  It was then a lonely track, with great bushes and hedgerows overhanging it; and as other emotions subsided, something of the chill and excitement of solitude stole over him.  The moon was wading through flecked masses of cloud.  The breath of night rustled lightly through the bushes, and seemed to follow her steps with a strange sort of sigh and a titter.  He stopped and looked back under the branches of an old thorn, and traced against the dark horizon the still darker outline of the ivied church tower of Chapelizod, and thought of the dead that lay there, and of all that those sealed lips might tell, and old tales of strange meetings on moors and desolate places with departed spirits, flitted across his brain; and the melancholy rush of the night air swept close about his ears, and he turned and walked more briskly toward his own gloomy quarters, passing the churchyard of Ballyfermot on his right.  There were plenty of head-stones among the docks and nettles:  some short and some tall, some straight and some slanting back, and some with a shoulder up, and a lonely old ash-tree still and dewy in the midst, glimmering cold among the moveless shadows; and then