‘Ill?’ said M’Guire. ‘O God!’ And then, recovering some shadow of his self-command, ‘Chronic, madam,’ said he: ‘a long course of the dumb ague. But since you are so compassionate—an errand that I lack the strength to carry out,’ he gasped—‘this bag to Portman Square. Oh, compassionate woman, as you hope to be saved, as you are a mother, in the name of your babes that wait to welcome you at home, oh, take this bag to Portman Square! I have a mother, too,’ he added, with a broken voice. ‘Number 19, Portman Square.’ I suppose he had expressed himself with too much energy of voice; for the woman was plainly taken with a certain fear of him. ‘Poor gentleman!’ said she. ‘If I were you, I would go home.’ And she left him standing there in his distress. ‘Home!’ thought M’Guire, ‘what a derision!’ What home was there for him, the victim of philanthropy? He thought of his old mother, of his happy youth; of the hideous, rending pang of the explosion; of the possibility that he might not be killed, that he might be cruelly mangled, crippled for life, condemned to lifelong pains, blinded perhaps, and almost surely deafened. Ah, you spoke lightly of the dynamiter’s peril; but even waiving death, have you realised what it is for a fine, brave young man of forty, to be smitten suddenly with deafness, cut off from all the music of life, and from the voice of friendship, and love? How little do we realise the sufferings of others! Even your brutal Government, in the heyday of its lust for cruelty, though it scruples not to hound the patriot with spies, to pack the corrupt jury, to bribe the hangman, and to erect the infamous gallows, would hesitate to inflict so horrible a doom: not, I am well aware, from virtue, not from philanthropy, but with the fear before it of the withering scorn of the good. But I wander from M’Guire. From this dread glance into the past and future, his thoughts returned at a bound upon the present. How had he wandered there? and how long—oh, heavens! how long had he been about it? He pulled out his watch; and found that but three minutes had elapsed. It seemed too bright a thing to be believed. He glanced at the church clock; and sure enough, it marked an hour four minutes faster than the watch.