"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 it! 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?"