My lady loathed herself for the thoughts which held possession of her mind. When the chancellor brought his news, she concealed the sudden turbulence within. Strangely enough, the mother's sympathies, even at that moment, were not for Terence--the son who had escaped the halter--but for Shane; and a great fear for him leaped up in her heart, to the crushing out of natural feeling. Terence was snatched from the grave as by a miracle. A foreboding took strong hold of my lady's mind that this was for a purpose--that Heaven, not satisfied with the penance of a lifetime, was determined that she should blab out to the world the secret which, lying on her bosom, had seared her life. Oh! why did she not accept her punishment all those years ago, when the task would not have been so hard? The earth had been no pleasant place of sojourn to my lady. When she thought of all she had borne since the old lord's death--of the utter futility of the penance--she became rebellious, and gnashed her teeth at the simpering portrait of him who had got off so easily. She rebelled against the iron sternness of Heaven. She was to bend her proud knees, was she--and confess? Her whitened hair and ashen cheeks were not to be taken into account? Very well, then. She defied Heaven; religion was a delusion and a snare; the Lord of Heaven unduly just. Tossing her favourite tracts into the fire, she swore she would not be driven to speak, though the ruin of her soul should be the penalty. At the time when it was decided that Terence was to die, she spent the long hours in reverie over the past--in poignant regret that he should have to be thus sacrificed. She reflected that if she had spoken all those years ago he would never have joined the popular side--would never have risked his neck--of that she felt assured; and so she felt in some sort as though she had herself handed him over to the scrag-boy. It was an awful thought, and it had weighed down her intellect. But now came a revulsion. It was not to be so. He was to live as a reproach. Heaven was hounding her down, so she stood at bay. If Heaven had accepted the penance of a life without requiring that the original transgression should be cancelled by confessing it she would gladly have borne the penance to the end of a long weary existence. But that the penance should not be accepted in any way as an equivalent, was maddening to her sense of justice. She bestirred herself; sat no longer dreaming the days away. The household whispered that my lady was herself again, that the joy of her son's reprieve was accountable for the happy change. All thought this save Gillin, who knew her secret. That excellent person scratched her untidy head with a comb and pondered. What did the wicked old woman mean to do? There was more mischief brewing--of that she felt quite sure. Well, Terence was saved from the gallows by direct interposition from above. He was not intended to be made a sacrifice, any more than Isaac was when his