"I, Mary Gallagher, being at the point of death,"--that was as she then supposed, but she lived many a year after, as the reader knows--"and as I hope for mercy from God, into whose presence I am summoned, declare that the girl-child who was buried beside my Mistress Gorman was not hers but mine. My twins were the boy who lives and the girl who died. My lady's child is the boy who passes as twin-brother to mine. It was Maurice Gorman led me to this wrong. The night that Terence Gorman, my master, was murdered and my lady died of the news, Maurice persuaded me to change my dead girl for my lady's living boy, threatening that unless I did so he would show that Mike, my husband, was his master's murderer. To save my husband I consented. Had I been sure of him I would have refused; but I feared Mike had a hand in that night's work, though I am sure it was not he who fired the shot. Thus I helped Maurice Gorman to become master of Kilgorman and all his brother's property. But they no more belong to him than the boy belongs to me. And if this be the last word I say on earth, it is all true, as Maurice knows himself, and Biddy the nurse, who writes this from my lips. God forgive me, and send this to the hands of them that will make the wrong right. (Signed) "Mary Gallagher." "N.B.--The above is true, every word, to my knowledge. (Signed) "Biddy McQuilkin." CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE. ON THE BLACK HILL ROAD. This, then, was the mystery which for eighteen years had hung over Kilgorman. My mother's letter cleared up a part of it, but the rest it plunged into greater mystery still. That Maurice Gorman was a villain and a usurper was evident. But who was the rightful heir my mother, either through negligence or of set purpose, had failed to state. Was it Tim? or I? I recalled all I could of my mother's words and acts to us both--how she taught us our letters; how she sang to us; how, when need be, she chid us; how, with a hand for each, she took us as children to church; how she kissed us both at nights, and gave us our porridge when we started for the hills in the morning. In all this she never by a sign betrayed that one of us was her son and the other a stranger. Even to the last, on the day she died, the words she spoke to me, I was convinced, she would equally have spoken to Tim, had he, not I, been there to hear them. Could it be possible that she did not herself know? Any mother who reads this will, I think, scoff at the notion; and yet I think it was so. Weak and ill as she was when it all happened, bewildered and dazed by the murder of her master and the terrible suspicion thrown on her husband, lying for weeks after in a half swoon, and believing herself at the gate of death, I think, in spite of all the mothers in Ireland, that when at last she came back to life, and looked on the two little fellows nestled in the bed at her side, she knew not the one from the other.