"It has perished, then!" he exclaimed, with a feeling of intense relief. "I knew it! I knew it! It, then, is not the child which is to cause my death. But, pshaw! why do I credit all that soi-disant prophet told me! Yet he spoke so truly of the past, I cannot avoid believing him. Perish on the scaffold! Heavens! if I felt sure of it, I would go mad. Ha! what is that? Can it be the ghastly white face of a child?"
He leaned over and bent down to see, but nothing met his eye save the white caps of the waves.
"Fool that I am!" he exclaimed, turning away impatiently. "Well might stony Madam Oranmore deem me a coward did she see me now. I will hasten back to her, and report the success of my mission."
He turned away, and strode in the direction of her house as fast as he could walk over the frozen ground, quite unconscious of what was at that same moment passing in another quarter of the city on that same eventful night.
CHAPTER IV.
BARRY ORANMORE.
——"Pray for the dead—
Why for the dead, who are at rest?
Pray for the living, in whose breast
The struggle between right and wrong
Is raging, terrible and strong."—Longfellow.
