natural thing that I should win the
love of ayven a young gyerrul, so it wasn't. An' so she became me
woife--my Nora--me darlin'--the loight of me loife. And she's
accompanied me iver since on all my wandherin's and phelandherin's, and
has made the home of the poor ixoile a paradoise, so she has."

All this was very confidential, and such a confidence would probably
never have been given, had it not been for the effects of "somethin'
warrum;" but it showed me several things in the plainest manner. The
first was, that Nora must be over thirty, at any rate, and was
therefore very much older than I had taken her to be. Again, her
English accent and style could be accounted for; and finally the
equally English accent and style of Marion could be understood and
accounted for on the grounds of Nora's influence. For a child always
catches the accent of its mother rather than of its father, and Nora
must, for nearly fifteen years, have been a sort of mother, more or
less, to Marion.

And now, why the mischief did Nora pretend to be my Lady of the Ice,
and in the very presence of Marion try to maintain a part which she
could not carry out? And why, if she were such a loving and faithful
wife, did she deliberately deceive the confiding O'Halloran, and make
him believe that she was the one whom I had saved? It was certainly not
from any want of love for him. It must have been some scheme of hers
which she had formed in connection with Marion. But what in the world
could such a scheme have been, and why in the world had she formed it?

This was the puzzling question that arose afresh, as O'Halloran
detailed to me very confidentially the history of this romantic
experience in his life.

But this was only one of his moods, and this mood passed away. The
romantic and the confidential was succeeded by the literary and the
scholastic, with a dash of the humorous.

A trivial remark of mine, in the course of some literary criticisms of
his, turned his thoughts to the subject of puns. He at once plunged
into the history of puns. He quoted Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence,
Cicero. He brought forward illustrations from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson,
Milton, Puritan, writers, Congreve, Cowper, and others, until he
concluded with Hood, who he declared had first unfolded to the human
mind the possibility of the pun.

From this he passed off lightly and easily into other things, and
finally glided into the subject of mediaeval Latin. This, he ass