as the liveried hue of the grave. Uttering a halfsuppressed scream of anguish, the affrighted girl wound one arm around the head of her parent, and supported it upon her bosom, while she pressed the other in an agony of suspense upon his heart. The organ of life had suspended its function for a short time, and was now, throb after throb, slowly resuming its office.

The chamber-door soon after opened, and Norry hurried to the assistance of her mistress. While the latter endeavoured to recal sensation by the usual physical applications and resources, sprinkling the face with cold water, chafing the temples, and placing the body in a horizontal position, the unsophisticated attendant took the more effectual course of forcing open the stiff clenched fingers of the right hand, and making the sign of the cross with her thumb upon the palm. This feat accomplished, she stood thumping her bosom, and awaiting its effect in perfect faith, at the bed's foot.

"Don't mind any more o' the water, Miss Cauthleen; the little criss-crass I made in his hand will soon lift him out o' the fit: it's the gentlemen, God speed 'em (here she crossed herself, and curtsied with much devotion), that were wantin to hoise him away with them this mornen". "Hush! hush! girl! fall back out of the light-he is recovering, God be thanked and praised!"

"Guilty-aye-guilty!" muttered the still unconscious object of their solicitude.

"God save us! Do you hear him, miss? "His senses are wandering yet".

"Where-where is he? Kate, my girl, you shall bear witness to this-call him! call him back!

"Whom, my dear father?-William ?"

"Mister Aylmer is gone off, miss", said Norry.

"Gone! I am lost! Ungrateful boy! If I wronged the father, did I not serve the son? Haste! call him back! he has my life in his hands".

"Quit the room, Norry!" exclaimed Katharine, stamping her foot against the boards with an expression of anger which was foreign to her nature. The servant obeyed, after a world of wondering gestures, crossings, and muttered ejaculations.

The violence of the action served, in some degree, to recal Fitzmaurice to a perfect consciousness of his situation. "What! Kate, my gentle Kate, grown passionate ?" he said, in wonder and tenderness, as he took her warm hand in his, and gazed still with some expression of listlessness into her eyes: "These veins have young and boiling blood within them, my little girl. You must learn to temper and subdue it in time, or it will lay the seeds of a bitter old age, and a fearful death for you".

"I will, sir-you are better, are you not, father?" said the daughter, regarding the speech as a part of the lingering delirium which had seized him, and affecting to coincide with it, in the light and cursory manner which one uses to satisfy the sufferer on all such occasions; and than which nothing can be more irritating, if the person towards whom it happens to be adopted should at all suspect its motive.

66

"You treat me like a child", said Fitzmaurice, with sharpness; no matter. It may be the time is not far distant, when it will be the act of a fool to mutter a word of reason in my ears", he continued, passing his hand over his brow, and turning his eyes wildly from her glance. "Yes. Many that have ate and drank at my board, would only eat and drink the freer, when the master of the house was in Swift's Hospital. And the mistress of Kilavariga would smile as merrily too. She would be her own mistress then. Go, go! You are like the rest. Go from me, girl, go from me

Shocked and wounded as she was by these expressions, the horrible indications by which they were accompanied were more than sufficient to stifle all the selfish feelings of

wronged and undervalued affection, which would at any other time have burned like a fever stroke within the breast of the devoted girl. Persisting, notwithstanding his pettish repulses, in clinging around her father's neck, she sobbed and wept upon his shoulder, until she felt an assurance of relenting in the renewed pressure of the hand, which he still retained.

"I did not, indeed, think of what I was saying, sir", she exclaimed, in her most repentant tones, perceiving at once that the surest way of redeeming her error, was by adopting the directly opposite course. "But why will not my father confide in me? I am no longer a child, in whom one should fear to repose a trust, nor am I incapable of feeling and participating in the grief, the secret grief, whatever it is, that is weighing down your heart. Do you not feel I love you, father? Have you not been my only friend from my very childhood? Has not all that I prize and reverence most, my knowledge of right and wrong, my perception of virtue, my religion, been all taught me by you, and you only? and how could I, if I were of the worst nature in the world, do otherwise than dearly love and honour you?"

Surprised, and not a little pleased with the energy and fervour with which the gentle girl made her appeal, the old man paused a moment, while he surveyed her with a moistened and affectionate eye. The very last phrase which she used, however, appeared to jar against his thought, and interrupt the kindly feeling that had begun to diffuse itself over his breast. His brow contracted, and he mused for a moment.

"Aye, Kate", said he, "but will you continue to hold this sentiment? Suppose the time should come when none but you could or would do other than revile and hate me, you think you would continue to honour your old, and perhaps erring, but fond, fond parent ?"

do

"It was the commandment of the Eternal God Him

self", exclaimed the maiden, in a burst of staid enthusiasm, "delivered amid the lightnings and thunders of the Holy Mountain, Honour thy Father and Mother!' and there was no reservation found upon the tablet of stone. Man may persecute, sickness may change, grief may depress, poverty may chill, or guilt may blacken the heart of a parent, but the bonds of the child are never loosened".

"Then, should the world call me a guilty wretch, and prove me little less, I may still have a daughter?"

"When that day comes, father, I will say my eyes and ears are false, and trust my heart alone, that will speak for you against them ".

The old man reclined against the head of the bed for a few moments, while his eyes closed and his lips moved in silence. Then, without altering his position, he waved his hand gently, and said in a soft and broken tone:

"Leave me, Kate, for a few minutes to myself. I will look for you in the parlour. Clear all signs of anxiety from your countenance, and prepare yourself for a mournful confidence".

Katharine obeyed in silence, and her father, after performing the duties of the toilet, began to deliberate within his own mind the events of the morning, and their most probable consequences.

It was a passing comfort to him to know, that he had at last found one to whom he might show himself such as he really was, without meeting that quick repulsive horror and distrust, which he feared worse than conscience; and yet it was a bitter humiliation to be reduced to the necessity of lowering himself in the eyes of his own child, and directing those feelings of terror and detestation at vice which his own instructions had generated in her mind, against himself in person. For one moment, an involuntary wish escaped him, that he had reared his daughter with a somewhat less acute susceptibility of the

hideousness of crime, and a more qualified admiration of its opposite, than now formed the groundwork of her character. It was but a glance of thought, however, in which neither his reason nor his feeling had any participation, and was forgotten even before it was condemned. He concluded by determining to make the confidence which he meditated, and after praying, for the first time in many a year, with a somewhat lightened spirit, he descended to the parlour, where Katharine was awaiting him.

The young lady in the mean time had been occupied with doubts and conjectures of an equally agitating, though a less gloomy character. Notwithstanding the warmth of feeling, into which she had been hurried by the enthusiasm of her affection during the preceding scene, she was very far from anticipating, even in thought, the possibility that her filial love could be put to so extreme a test as her words declared it capable of surviving, and she looked for nothing more in truth than her father had himself led her to expect "a mournful confidence". Even the wild and haggard air which was about his features and actions as he entered the room, were insufficient to lead her to suspect that his promised secret could comprise any thing of a darker or more fearful hue.

He motioned his daughter to keep her seat, and after glancing along the passage by which he approached, closed the door and slipped the little bolt into its place. Then, after pacing up and down the room several times, as if debating with himself the easiest mode of opening a conversation so replete with humiliation to one party, and horror to the other, as that which he was about to enter upon, he stopped opposite his daughter's chair, and fixing his eye, all lighted up as it was with a thousand fearful emotions, on her mild and tenderly anxious glance, he said:

"You know not, perhaps, or have not considered the full extent of the consequence which you draw upon yourself

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