both make your confession and
hear mass, and my mind will be at rest; and you'll find poor Una happier
and more like herself."

But 'tween cup and lip there's many a slip. The priest was not destined
to hear poor Una's shrift. When she bid her sister goodnight she looked
on her with her large, cold, wild eyes, till something of her old human
affections seemed to gather there, and they slowly filled with tears,
which dropped one after the other on her homely dress as she gazed in
her sister's face.

Alice, delighted, sprang up, and clasped her arms about her neck. "My
own darling treasure,'tis all over; you love your poor Alice again, and
will be happier than ever."

But while she held her in her embrace Una's eyes were turned towards the
window, and her lips apart, and Alice felt instinctively that her
thoughts were already far away.

"Hark!--listen!--hush!" and Una, with her delighted gaze fixed, as if
she saw far away beyond the castle wall, the trees, the glen, and the
night's dark curtain, held her hand raised near her ear, and waved her
head slightly in time, as it seemed, to music that reached not Alice's
ear, and smiled her strange pleased smile, and then the smile slowly
faded away, leaving that sly suspicious light behind it which somehow
scared her sister with an uncertain sense of danger; and she sang in
tones so sweet and low that it seemed but a reverie of a song,
recalling, as Alice fancied, the strain to which she had just listened
in that strange ecstasy, the plaintive and beautiful Irish ballad,
"Shule, shule, shule, aroon," the midnight summons of the outlawed Irish
soldier to his darling to follow him.

Alice had slept little the night before. She was now overpowered with
fatigue; and leaving her candle burning by her bedside, she fell into a
deep sleep. From this she awoke suddenly, and completely, as will
sometimes happen without any apparent cause, and she saw Una come into
the room. She had a little purse of embroidery--her own work--in her
hand; and she stole lightly to the bedside, with her peculiar oblique
smile, and evidently thinking that her sister was asleep.

Alice was thrilled with a strange terror, and did not speak or move; and
her sister slipped her hand softly under her bolster, and withdrew it.
Then Una stood for while by the hearth, and stretched her hand up to the
mantelpiece, from which she took a little bit of chalk, and Alice
thought she saw her place it in the fingers o