s a hasty scrambling
to the feet, for the men had not drunk deep, and by all in the house,
except her brother, the girl was treated with respect. After a fashion,
they were to a man in love with her.

"I was thinking," Asgill said, foreseeing trouble, "that you were in
bed and asleep." Her hair was tied back negligently and her dress
half-fastened at the throat.

"I cannot sleep," she answered. And then she stood a moment drumming
with her slender fingers on the table, and the men noticed that she was
unusually pale. "I cannot sleep," she repeated, a tremor in her voice.
"I keep thinking of him. I want some one--to go to him."

"Now?"

"Now!"

"But," Asgill said slowly, "I'm thinking that to do that were to give
him hopes. It were to spoil all. Once in twenty-four hours--that was
agreed, and he was told. And it is not four hours since you were there.
If there is one thing needful, not the least doubt of it!--it is to
leave him thinking that we're meaning it."

He spoke gently and reasonably. But the girl laboured, it was plain,
under a weight of agitation that did not suffer her to reason, much
less to answer him reasonably. She was as one who wakes in the dark
night, with the terror of an evil dream upon him, and cannot for a time
shake it off. "But if he dies?" she cried in a woeful tone. "If he dies
of hunger? Oh, my God, of hunger! What have we done then? I tell you,"
she continued, struggling with overwhelming emotion, "I cannot bear it!
I cannot bear it!" She looked from one to the other as appealing to
each in turn to share her horror, and to act. "It is wicked, it is
wicked!" she continued, in a shriller tone and with a note of defiance
in her voice, "and who will answer for it? Who will answer for it, if
he dies? I, not you! I, who tricked him, who lied to him, who lured him
there!"

For a moment there was a stricken silence in the room. Then, "And what
had he done to you?" Asgill retorted with spirit--for he saw that if he
did not meet her on her own plane she was capable of any act, however
ruinous. "Or, if not to you, to Ireland, to your King, to your Country,
to your hopes?" He flung into his voice all the indignation of which he
was master. "A trick, you say? Was it not by a trick he ruined all? The
fairest prospect, the brightest day that ever dawned for Ireland! The
day of freedom, of liberty, of----"

She twisted her fingers feverishly together. "Yes," she said, "yes!
Yes, but--I can't bear i