“The blessed virgin guide and prothect me,” said Anty, “for I want her guidance this minute.  Oh, that the walls of a convent was round me this minute—­I wouldn’t know what throuble was!”

“And you needn’t know anything about throuble,” said Martin, who didn’t quite like his mistress’s allusion to a convent.  “You don’t suppose there’s a word of thruth in all this long story of Mr Daly’s?—­He knows,—­and I’ll say it out to his face—­he knows Barry don’t dare carry on with sich a schame.  He knows he’s only come here to frighten you out of this, that Barry may have his will on you again.”

“And God forgive him his errand here this day,” said the widow, “for it was a very bad one.”

“If you will allow me to offer you my advice, Miss Lynch,” said Daly, “you will put yourself, at any rate for a time, under your brother’s protection.”

“She won’t do no sich thing,” said the widow.  “What! to be locked into the parlour agin—­and be nigh murdhered? holy father!”

“Oh, no,” said Anty, at last, shuddering in horror at the remembrance of the last night she passed in Dunmore House, “I cannot go back to live with him, but I’ll do anything else, av’ he’ll only lave me, and my kind, kind friends, in pace and quiet.”

“Indeed, and you won’t, Anty,” said the widow; “you’ll do nothing for him.  Your frinds—­that’s av’ you mane the Kellys—­is very able to take care of themselves.”

“If your brother, Miss Lynch, will lave Dunmore House altogether, and let you have it to yourself, will you go and live there, and give him the promise not to marry Martin Kelly?”

“Indeed an’ she won’t,” said the widow.  “She’ll give no promise of the kind.  Promise, indeed! what for should she promise Barry Lynch whom she will marry, or whom she won’t?”

“Raily, Mrs Kelly, I think you might let Miss Lynch answer for herself.”

“I wouldn’t, for all the world thin, go to live at Dunmore House,” said Anty.

“And you are determined to stay in this inn here?”

“In course she is—­that’s till she’s a snug house of her own,” said the widow.

“Ah, mother!” said Martin, “what for will you be talking?”

“And you’re determined,” repeated Daly, “to stay here?”

“I am,” faltered Anty.

“Then I have nothing further to do than to hand you this, Mrs Kelly”—­and he offered the notice to the widow, but she refused to touch it, and he consequently put it down on the table.  “But it is my duty to tell you, Miss Lynch, that the gentry of this counthry, before whom you will have to appear, will express very great indignation at your conduct in persevering in placing poor people like the Kellys in so dreadful a predicament, by your wilful and disgraceful obstinacy.”

Poor Anty burst into tears.  She had been for some time past trying to restrain herself, but Daly’s last speech, and the horrible idea of the gentry of the country browbeating and frowning at her, completely upset her, and she hid her face on the arm of the sofa, and sobbed aloud.