‘Who—­what’s the matter?’ cried Nutter, looking in the direction of his poor wife’s gaze in black wrath and bewilderment, and beholding the weird woman who had followed him into the room.  As he gazed on that pale, wicked face and sable shape, the same sort of spell which she exercised upon Mrs. Mack, and poor Mrs. Nutter, seemed in a few seconds to steal over Nutter himself, and fix him in the place where he stood.  His mahogany face bleached to sickly boxwood, and his eyes looked like pale balls of stone about to leap from their sockets.

After a few seconds, however, with a sort of gasp, like a man awaking from a frightful sleep, he said—­

‘Betty, take the mistress to her room;’ and to his wife, ’go, sweetheart.  Mrs. Macnamara, this must be explained,’ he added; and taking her by the hand, he led her in silence to the hall-door, and signed to the driver.

‘Oh! thank you, Mr. Nutter,’ she stammered; ’but the coach is not mine; it came with that lady who’s with Mrs. Nutter.’

He had up to this moved with her like a somnambulist.

‘Ay, that lady; and who the devil is she?’ and he seized her arm with a sudden grasp that made her wince.

‘Oh! that lady!’ faltered Mrs. Mack—­’she’s, I believe—­she’s Mrs. Matchwell—­the—­the lady that advertises her abilities.’

‘Hey!  I know—­the fortune-teller, and go-between,—­her!’

She was glad he asked her no more questions, but let her go, and stood in a livid meditation, forgetting to bid her good evening.  She did not wait, however, for his courteous dismissal, but hurried away towards Chapelizod.  The only thing connected with the last half-hour’s events that seemed quite clear and real to the scared lady was the danger of being overtaken by that terrible woman, and a dreadful sense of her own share as an accessory in the untold mischief that had befallen poor Mrs. Nutter.

In the midst of her horrors and agitation Mrs. Mack’s curiosity was not altogether stunned.  She wondered vaguely, as she pattered along, with what dreadful exhibition of her infernal skill Mary Matchwell had disordered the senses of poor little Mrs. Nutter—­had she called up a red-eyed, sooty-raven to her shoulder—­as old Miss Alice Lee (when she last had a dish of tea with her) told her she had once done before—­and made the ominous bird speak the doom of poor Mrs. Nutter from that perch? or had she raised the foul fiend in bodily shape, or showed her Nutter’s dead face through the water?

With these images flitting before her brain, she hurried on at her best pace, fancying every moment that she heard the rumble of the accursed coach behind her, and longing to see the friendly uniform of the Royal Irish Artillery, and the familiar house fronts of the cheery little street, and above all, to hide herself securely among her own household gods.

When Nutter returned to the parlour his wife had not yet left it.