"Oh, Æneas!" said she, before she could get his greatcoat from off his shoulders, "have you heard the news?" "What news?--about Castle Richmond?" "Yes; about Castle Richmond." And then she knew that he had heard it. Some glimmering of Lady Fitzgerald's early history had been known to both of them, as it had been known almost to all in the country; but in late years this history had been so much forgotten, that men had ceased to talk of it, and this calamity therefore came with all the weight of a new misfortune. "And, Æneas, who told you of it?" she asked, as they sat together over the fire, in their dingy, dirty parlour. "Well, strange to say, I heard it first from Father Barney." "Oh, mercy! and is it all about the country in that way?" "Herbert, you know, has not been at any one of the Committees for the last ten days, and Mr. Somers for the last week past has been as silent as death; so much so, that that horrid creature, Father Columb, would have made a regular set speech the other day at Gortnaclough, if I hadn't put him down." "Dear, dear, dear!" said Mrs. Townsend. "And I was talking to Father Barney about this, to-day--about Mr. Somers, that is." "Yes, yes, yes!" "And then he said, 'I suppose you know what has happened at Castle Richmond?'" "How on earth had he learned?" asked Mrs. Townsend, jealous that a Roman Catholic priest should have heard such completely Protestant news before the Protestant parson and his wife. "Oh, they learn everything--from the servants I suppose." "Of course, the mean creatures!" said Mrs. Townsend, forgetting, probably, her own little conversation with her own man of all work that morning. "But go on, Æneas." "'What has happened,' said I, 'at Castle Richmond?' 'Oh, you haven't heard,' said he. And I was obliged to own that I had not, though I saw that it gave him a kind of triumph. 'Why,' said he, 'very bad news has reached them indeed; the worst of news.' And then he told me about Lady Fitzgerald. To give him his due, I must say that he was very sorry--very sorry. 'The poor young fellow!' he said--'The poor young fellow!' And I saw that he turned away his face to hide a tear." "Crocodile tears!" said Mrs. Townsend. "No, they were not," said her reverend lord; "and Father Barney is not so bad as I once thought him." "I hope you are not going over too, Æneas?" And his consort almost cried as such a horrid thought entered her head. In her ideas any feeling short of absolute enmity to a servant of the Church of Rome was an abandonment of some portion of the Protestant basis of the Church of England. "The small end of the wedge," she would call it, when people around her would suggest that the heart of a Roman Catholic priest might possibly not be altogether black and devilish. "Well, I hope not, my dear," said Mr. Townsend, with a slight touch of sarcasm in his voice. "But, as I was saying, Father Barney told me then that this Mr. Prendergast--"