t! I can't! I can't! It is no use talking," she
continued with a violent shudder. "You are here--look!" she pointed to
the table strewn with the remains of the meal, with flasks and glasses
and tall silver-edged horns. "But he is--starving! Starving!" she
repeated, as if the physical pain touched herself.

"You shall go to him to-morrow! Go, yourself!" he replied in a soothing
tone.

"I!" she cried. "Never!"

"Oh, but----" Asgill began, perplexed but not surprised by her
attitude--"But here's your brother," he continued, relieved. "He will
tell you--he'll tell you, I'm sure, that nothing can be so harmful as
to change now. Your sister," he went on, addressing The McMurrough, who
had just descended the stairs, "she's wishing some one will go to the
Colonel, and see if he's down a peg. But I'm telling her----"

"It's folly entirely, you should be telling her!" James McMurrough
replied, curtly and roughly. Intercourse with Payton had not left him
in the best of tempers. "To-morrow at sunset, and not an hour earlier,
he'll be visited. And then it'll be you, Flavvy, that'll speak to him!
What more is it you're wanting?"

"I speak to him?" she cried. "I couldn't!"

"But it'll be you'll have to!" he replied roughly. "Wasn't it so
arranged?"

"I couldn't," she replied, in the same tone of trouble. "Some one
else--if you like!"

"But it's not some one else will do," James retorted.

"But why should I be the one--to go?" she wailed. She had Colonel
John's face before her, haggard, sunken, famished, as, peering into the
gloomy, firelit room, she had seen it that afternoon, ay, and as she
had seen it later against the darkness of her bedroom. "Why should I,"
she repeated, "be the one to go?"

"For a very good reason," her brother retorted with a sneer. And he
looked at Asgill and laughed.

That look, which she saw, and the laugh which went with it, startled
her as a flash of light startles a traveller groping through darkness.
"Why?" she repeated in a different tone. "Why?"

But neither her tone nor Asgill's warning glance put James McMurrough
on his guard; he was in one of his brutal humours. "Why?" he replied.
"Because he's a silly fool, as I'm thinking some others are, and has a
fancy for you, Flavvy! Faith, you're not blind!"--he continued,
forgetting that he had only learned the fact from Asgill a few days
before, and that it was news to the younger men--"and know it, I'll be
sworn, as well as I do! Any way, I'