on. The judge seemed to think the suggestion officious. However, he turned to say to the counsel for the Crown: Brother Fitzgibbon, the jury seem to have made up their minds, and to wish the case stopped.'

'Faith, my lord,' replied Denny in the broadest brogue, faith, my lord, the case is like Dick Quin's sedan chair. "As the bottom's dropped out of it, if it wasn't for the honour of the thing, I'd as lieve be out of it myself"

Denny, having made his big speech, was only too glad to escape the bathos of a second address; but the unfortunate judge, who had prepared before the trial all the effective passages of his charge, could not take kindly to the collapse of the case. There was no help for it, however, and he had to let the jury return at once so inevitable a verdict.

The foreman, who was an enthusiastic person (for a tailor), got his colleagues to consent to the following appendix to their verdict of Not Guilty.' That the prisoner

deserved the thanks of his country for endeavouring to prevent, at the risk of his life, the crime he had stood there to answer for with his life.'

The judge suppressed the appendix, but the foreman, who was proud of the pithy and pointed antithesis (as he considered it), took care that it should appear in the papers.

The verdict was hailed with deafening cheers in court, which were caught up by the vast crowd outside, and Miles and Maurice had to be smuggled out by a back-way to escape a royal reception. Maurice, however, instead of spending the evening with Norah, as he had hoped and yearned to do, had to address an immense and enthusiastic audience in the Rotunda on behalf of the Land League. His address, we may say in passing, was an unfortunate mistake. It turned back the current of English sympathy which would otherwise have run in his favour. From one end of it to the other,' remarked the 'Times' on his speech,

'there was not one single word of gratitude to the English Government which had released him from Kilmainham little more than a fortnight since, or to the law of England which gave him that very morning so fair a trial and so frank and full an acquittal. But gratitude, it pains us to admit, is so far from being an Irish virtue, that every fresh act or instance, measure or overture of conciliation, serves but to stir up the rancour of this perverse and implacable race.'

CHAPTER XLVII.

FALL OF THE CURTAIN.

And so an end of all i' the story.' -The Ring and the Book.

Ir will be seen that nearly the whole of the story we have taken so long to tell was told by one or other of the witnesses in court; and Maurice knew no sooner than the whole world that he owed Norah his life. In the dock, too, he learned the secret of her intimacy with Mr. Reid Summers and of the mystery she had made of it. And when he quitted the dock amid cheers that shook the court, and that rolled in a wide wave from street to street in its neighbourhood, it was not of his recovered life and liberty he was thinking, or of this sudden and overpowering popularity, but of Norah. The first words. he said when they got into a cab, and Miles in

speechless joy grasped both his hands, were: 'How is she?'

'She's been sure of it since yesterday morning, and it has saved her life. Maurice,' he said solemnly; 'it was life or death for her, too.' Maurice leaned back in the cab and didn't trust himself to speak.

'She won't let Eileen out of her sight for a moment; and I don't know how many times she has made the girl tell Dennis' story and her own. It keeps her from thinking it all a dream. The poor child has had so much trouble lately that she can hardly believe in joy.' Maurice remained still silent. He was picturing, as he had pictured them in his cell a hundred times over in the past sleepless night, those terrible scenes which had nearly upset her reason.

Miles, to give him time to master the emotion which he knew kept him silent, talked

on :

'But it's been for the best, my boy, as the