total contempt for life; pronouncing, that with
the loss of his political hopes it had lost its value, and making but
one request to the council, that, "since fortune had flung him into the
hands of their law, its vengeance might be done upon him with the least
possible delay."

He was now removed; and a feeling of regret and admiration followed his
removal. But his crime was undeniable, the disturbance of the public
mind was too serious to allow of any relaxation in the rigour of
justice; and I gave my unwilling signature to his final consignment to
the state prison.

I was now once again disengaged from the fetters of office; and,
resolved not to spend another day of suspense, I drove to the hotel. I
found it crowded with families which had fled from their houses in the
country in the first alarm of the insurrection; and in the midst of the
good-humoured but unmanageable tumults of a great household of Irish
strangers, was forced to make my own way at last. In passing along the
gallery, my eye was caught by a valise laid outside one of the parlours,
and corded, as for an immediate departure. It was marked with "La
Comtesse de Tourville." I knocked gently at the door. I was unanswered.
I touched it--it gave way, and I stood on the threshold. Before me, at a
table, sat a female figure writing, with her face turned from me, and
apparently so deeply engaged as not to have heard my entrance. But I
should have known her among a million. I pronounced her name. She
started up, in evident alarm at the intrusion. But in the next moment,
her pale countenance was flushed by nature's loveliest rose, and she
held forth her hand to me. All my fears vanished with that look and the
touch of that hand. All the language of earth would not have told me
half what they told at that moment. Of this I say no more. It was the
golden moment of my life; I make no attempt to describe our interview,
to describe the indescribable.

I returned to the Castle a new being. The burden which had weighed so
long upon my spirits was removed. The root of bitterness, which
continually sent up its noxious vegetation in the midst of the most
flattering hopes of my public existence, was now extirpated; I was
secure in the full confidence of one of the loveliest and the
noblest-hearted of human beings. And yet how narrowly had I escaped the
loss of all? Clotilde, hopeless of ever hearing of me more, had formed
the determination to leave Ireland on that day;