Sleepless and miserable to Katey Tyrrel was the night that followed her interview with the Stranger. The fearful and critical position in which she was placed caused her, for the first time in her life, to go through a rigid course of self-examination, the result of which but added to her alarm and anxiety. For some months past the person she had just parted from had been a sojourner in lodgings at Cahill's under circumstances of great privacy--rarely venturing out during the day, and in the evening only with secresy and caution. As that remote country, ill-supplied at the period with police, (and even those of the most "ancient and quiet" description,) and wholly inaccessible to bailiffs and all other functionaries attendant on county sheriffs, was deemed peculiarly favourable as quarters for that class of magnanimous men whose expenditure happens to exceed their incomes, to the detriment of their tailors and their own personal inconvenience, it was soon whispered, and as quickly believed, that the resident at Cahill's was one of that generous brotherhood, or in other words, was "a gentleman on his keeping."[24] In her visits to the shop, which, from her idle though innocent life, were frequent, Katey had several times encountered him as he sauntered in and out. An intimacy sprang up. There was a frankness and a half-military air in his deportment that interested her. He had evidently seen much of the world and society, his conversation was lively and varied, his knowledge and accomplishments, to the secluded country girl, seemed extensive, and round all circled a halo of mystery, not the least of those attractions for Katey, whose passion for riding to the Kilfane hounds had just been succeeded by a stronger one for Mrs Radcliffe and romances. Time flew on. Their daily interviews improved to evening rambles, the interchange of notes, supplies of books and flowers upon one side, an avowal of love and tale of lofty but luckless patriotism on the other. To the object of his passion alone did the stranger confide his story. Fascinated by the principles of freedom with which France had lately inoculated mankind, and maddened by the miseries of ill-government under which his own green Island groaned, he had engaged, full of hope and high aspirations, in that enterprise for the recovery of her national independence, which terminated in the martyrdom of as noble and pure-spirited a being as sleeps buried and unhonoured in "the cross ways of fame"--ROBERT EMMETT. The Stranger had been dispatched, he said, to the south to forward the movement of his party in that quarter, when their central Power in the capital prematurely exploded, carrying dismay and destruction to every remoter organ of the confederacy. His name--the name of Fergus Hewitt, citizen of the new Western Republic, and major of brigade--was one of the first upon the list of the proscribed; a reward was offered for his head; and it was while