As these thoughts passed rapidly through her mind, she opened a cupboard close at hand, and drew from thence a bottle of wine, with some other articles of delicate food, packed carefully in a wicker-basket, and evidently left there for some especial purpose. She then sought through the gloom for a cloak, which she threw upon her shoulders, and, drawing the hood down over her face, and taking the basket on her arm, she hastily left the room. Not, however, by the door through which Hamish and the servants had retreated, but by another at the opposite end, and which was almost invisible, in consequence of its forming one of the panels in the black oak wainscoting of the chamber. It led her directly by a short stone passage to another door or low wicket, on opening which she found herself in the private grounds of the castle. Before her at no great distance, stood an old ivy-covered church, half hidden in a group of tall Irish trees, which sheltered its little cemetery. {181} This was not the parish church, but a private chapel, built by the Netterville family for their own particular use; and here their infants had been baptized, their daughters married, and their old men and women laid reverently to their last slumbers, ever since they had established their existence in the land. Mrs. Netterville could not resist a sigh as she glanced toward its venerable walls. It seemed as if it were only yesterday that she had gone there to lay down her husband in his lowly grave, hoping and praying, out of the depths of her own great grief, that she might soon be permitted to sleep quietly beside him. And now, even this sad hope was to be hers no longer; this poor possession of six feet of earth was to be wrested from her; strangers would lay her in a distant grave, and even in death she would be separated from her husband. The thought was too painful to bear much lingering upon it, and turning her back upon the church, Mrs. Netterville followed a path which lay close under the castle walls, and led to a court-yard at a considerable distance. Round this court-yard were grouped stables and other offices, which, having been built at different periods and without any consecutive idea as a whole, presented rather the appearance of a collection of stunted farm-houses, than of the regular out-buildings of an important mansion. Each of these houses had a private entrance of its own; and opening the door of one of them, Mrs. Netterville looked in quietly and entered. The interior was a room, poorly but yet decently furnished, and on a low settle-bed at the farther end lay a young man, who, with his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, had all the look of a person just rescued from the jaws of death. A knapsack on the floor, a pike and musket in one corner of the room, and a steel cap and buff coat in another, seemed to announce him as one of the band of successful soldiers who were even then in possession of the castle.