O'Halloran advanced quickly, and caught me by the hand.
"D'ye know what ye've done?" said he, abruptly, without greeting or salutation of any kind. "D'ye know what ye've done? Ye seeved my loife at the concert. But are you aweer what you've done be-soides?"
He looked at me earnestly, and with so strange an expression that for a moment I thought he must be mad.
"Well, really," said I, somewhat confusedly, "Mr. O'Halloran, I must confess I'm not aware of any thing in particular."
"He doesn't know!" cried O'Halloran. "He doesn't know. 'Tis'n't the sloightest conception that he has! Will, thin, me boy," said he—and all this time he held my hand, and kept wringing it hard—"will, thin —I've another dibt of gratichood, and, what's more, one that I nivir can raypay. D'ye know what ye've done? D'ye know what re are? No? Will, thin, I'll tell ye. Ye're the seevior of me Nora, me darlin', me proide, me own. She was the one that ye seeved on the oice, and riscued from desthruction. There she stands. Look at her. But for you, she'd be now lost forivir to the poor owld man whose light an' loife an' trisure she always was. Nora, jewel, there he is, as sure as a gun, though whoy he didn't recognoize ye last noight passes moy faible comprayhinsion, so it docs."
Saying this, he let go my hand and looked toward Nora.
At this astounding announcement I stood simply paralyzed. I stared at each in succession. To give an idea of my feelings is simply impossible. I must refer every thing to the imagination of the reader; and, by way of comparison to assist his imagination, I beg leave to call his attention to our old friend, the thunder-bolt. "Had a thunder-bolt burst," and all that sort of thing. Fact, sir. Dumbfounded. By Jove! that word even does not begin to express the idea.
Now for about twenty hours, in dreams as well as in waking moments, I bad been brooding over the identity of the lady of the ice, and had become convinced that the O'Halloran ladies knew something about it; yet so obtuse was I that I had not suspected that the lady herself might be found in this house. In fact, such an event was at once so romantic and so improbable that it did not even suggest itself. But now here was the lady herself. Here she stood. Now I could understand the emotion, the agitation, and all that, of the previous evening. This would at once account for it all. And here she stood—the lady herself —and that lady was no other than Miss O'Halloran.
By Jove!
Miss O'Halloran looked very much confused, and very much embarrassed. Her eyes lowered and sought the floor, and in this way she advanced and took my proffered hand. 'Pon my life, I don't think I ever saw any thing more beautiful than she was as this confusion covered her lovely face; and the eyes which thus avoided mine seemed to my imagination still more lovely than they had been before.