eir home were not the strangest part of their
history. Their father had been a man hated by his own class for his
broad and generous views at a time when the whole country was
disturbed, and loved by his poorer neighbours for the same reason. He
had been murdered by a terrible mistake. It was not the master,
Michael Darragh, but his Roman Catholic brother Niel, the murderer had
meant to kill. Niel Darragh, when he and his sister had been driven
out of their father's house for their religious views, had taken a farm
about a mile from Rowallan, and it was over his title to this farm the
quarrel had arisen that had ended in the master being murdered,
mistaken in the dark for his brother. The children's mother was an
Englishwoman, who came of an old Puritan stock, and had married against
the wishes of her family. Her husband's death was God's judgment for
her wickedness, she thought. She had never recovered from the shock of
the murder, and was only able to move with Lull's help from her bed to
a couch by the window, and she was so entirely occupied with her own
troubles that she often forgot the children existed. So it came that
they were being brought up by Lull, their father's old nurse, and Andy
Graham, the coachman. Lull had so much else to do, with all the work
of the house, and an invalid mistress to wait on, that the children
were left to come and go as they pleased. Twice a week they went to
old Mr Rannigan, the rector, for lessons, but on other days they roamed
for miles over the country, making friends at every cottage they
passed. When they came home in the evening Lull was always waiting
with supper by the kitchen fire, ready to hear their adventures, to
sympathise or reprove as she saw fit. So long as they were well fed
and clothed, and did nothing Quality would be ashamed of, she said she
was content. Days spent on the mountains, fishing in some brown
stream, helping an old peasant to herd his cow, or watching a woman
spin by her door, taught the children more than they learnt from Mr
Rannigan. They brought back to Lull stories of ghosts, Orange and
Papist, who fought by night on the bridge that had once been slippery
with their blood; of the devil's strange doings in the mountains: how
he had bitten a piece out of one--the marks of his teeth showed to this
day; or milder tales of fairy people--leprachauns, and the fiddlers
whose music only the good could hear. Lull believed them all, crossed
he