power, would she leave him to be treated as they chose,
while she lay warm and safe in the house which his interference had
saved for her?

Oh! cruel!

Then--for no man was more just than this man, though many surpassed him
in tact--the very barbarity of an action so false and so unwomanly
suggested that, viewed from her side, it must wear another shape. For
even Delilah was a Philistine, and by her perfidy served her country.
What was this girl gaining? Revenge, yes; yet, if they kept faith with
him, and, the deed signed, let him go free, she had not even revenge.
For the rest, she lost by the deed. All that her grandfather had meant
for her passed by it to her brother. To lend herself to stripping
herself was not the part of a selfish woman. Even in her falseness
there was something magnanimous.

He sat drumming on the table with his fingers, and thinking of it. She
had been false to him, treacherous, cruel! But not for her own sake,
not for her private advantage; rather to her hurt. Viewed on that side,
there was something to be said for her.

He was still staring dreamily at the table when a shadow falling on the
table roused him. He lifted his eyes to the nearest loophole, through
which the setting sun had been darting its rays a moment before. Morty
O'Beirne bending almost double--for outside, the arrow-slit was not
more than two feet from the ground--was peering in.

"Ye'll not have changed your quarters, Colonel," he said, in a tone of
raillery which was assumed perhaps to hide a real feeling of shame.
"Sure, you're there, Colonel, safe enough?"

"Yes, I am here," Colonel John answered austerely. He did not leave his
seat at the table.

"And as much at home as a mole in a hill," Morty continued. "And, like
that same blessed little fellow in black velvet that I take my hat off
to, with lashings of time for thinking."

"So much," Colonel John answered, with the same severe look, "that I am
loth to think ill of any. Are you alone, Mr. O'Beirne?"

"Faith, and who'd there be with me?" Morty answered in true Irish
fashion.

"I cannot say. I ask only, Are you alone?"

"Then I am, and that's God's truth," Morty replied, peering
inquisitively into the corners of the gloomy chamber. "More by token I
wish you no worse than just to be doing as you're bid--and faith, it's
but what's right!--and go your way. 'Tis a cold, damp, unchancy place
you've chosen, Colonel," he continued, with a grin; "like nothing in
a