And during that long night as Herbert and his sisters sat up cowering round the fire, he told them of all that had been said at Hap House. "And can it not be as he says?" Mary had asked. "And that Herbert should give up his wife!" said Emmeline. "No; but that other thing." "Do not dream of it," said Herbert. "It is all, all impossible. The house that we are now in belongs to Sir Owen Fitzgerald." CHAPTER XXXI. THE FIRST MONTH. And now I will beg my readers to suppose a month to have passed by since Sir Thomas Fitzgerald died. It was a busy month in Ireland. It may probably be said that so large a sum of money had never been circulated in the country in any one month since money had been known there; and yet it may also be said that so frightful a mortality had never occurred there from the want of that which money brings. It was well understood by all men now that the customary food of the country had disappeared. There was no longer any difference of opinion between rich and poor, between Protestant and Roman Catholic; as to that, no man dared now to say that the poor, if left to themselves, could feed themselves, or to allege that the sufferings of the country arose from the machinations of money-making speculators. The famine was an established fact, and all men knew that it was God's doing,--all men knew this, though few could recognize as yet with how much mercy God's hand was stretched out over the country. Or may it not perhaps be truer to say that in such matters there is no such thing as mercy--no special mercies--no other mercy than that fatherly, forbearing, all-seeing, perfect goodness by which the Creator is ever adapting this world to the wants of His creatures, and rectifying the evils arising from their faults and follies? _Sed quo Musa tendis?_ Such discourses of the gods as these are not to be fitly handled in such small measures.