that such are my orders; for I swear, if I find that any
one of you shall speak of it, my utmost vengeance shall pursue him or
her to death itself. That will do." And he signed to her to retire.

CHAPTER XVIII. Dunphy visits the County Wicklow

--Old Sam and his Wife.

It was about a week subsequent to the interview which the stranger had
with old Dunphy, unsuccessful as our readers know it to have been, that
the latter and his wife were sitting in the back parlor one night after
their little shop had been closed, when the following dialogue took
place between them:

"Well, at all events," observed the old man, "he was the best of them,
and to my own knowledge that same saicret lay hot and heavy on his
conscience, especially to so good a master and mistress as they were to
him. The truth is, Polly, I'll do it."

"But why didn't he do it himself?" asked his wife.

"Why?--why?" he replied, looking at her with his keen ferret eyes--"why,
don't you know what a weak-minded, timorsome creature he was, ever since
the height o' my knee?"

"Oh, ay," she returned; "and I hard something about an oath, I think,
that they made him take."

"You did," said her husband; "and it was true, too. They swore him never
to breathe a syllable of it until his dying day--an' although they meant
by that that he should never reveal it at all, yet he always was of
opinion that he might tell it on that day, but on no other one. And it
was his intention to do so."

"Wasn't it an unlucky thing that she happened to be out when he could
do it with a safe conscience?" observed his wife.

"They almost threatened the life out of the poor creature," pursued
her husband, "for Tom threatened to murder him if he betrayed them; and
Ginty to poison him, if Tom didn't keep his word--and I believe in my
sowl that the same devil's pair would a' done either the one or the
other, if he had broken his oath. Of the two, however, Ginty's the
worst, I think; and I often believe, myself, that she deals with the
devil; but that, I suppose, is bekaise she's sometimes not right in her
head still."

"If she doesn't dale with the devil, the devil dales with her at any
rate," replied the other. "They'll be apt to gain their point, Tom and
she."

"Tom, I know, is just as bitther as she is," observed the old man, "and
Ginty, by her promises as to what she'll do for him, has turned his
heart altogether to stone; and yet I know a man that's bittherer against