"Miss Hickey," I said: "there is in me, as you have said, a bad angel. Do not shock my good angel--who is a person of taste--quite away from my heart, lest the other be left undisputed monarch of it. Hark! The chapel bell is ringing the angelus. Can you, with that sound softening the darkness of the village night, cherish a feeling of spite against one who admires you?" "You come between me and my prayers" she said hysterically, and began to sob. She had scarcely done so when I heard voices without. Then Langan and the priest entered. "Oh, Phil," she cried, running to him, "take me away from him: I cant bear----" I turned towards him, and shewed him my dog-tooth in a false smile. He felled me at one stroke, as he might have felled a poplar-tree. "Murdher!" exclaimed the priest. "What are you doin, Phil?" "He's an informer," sobbed Kate. "He came down here to spy on you, uncle, and to try and show that the blessed miracle was a makeshift. I knew it long before he told me, by his insulting ways. He wanted to make love to me." I rose with difficulty from beneath the table where I had lain motionless for a moment. "Sir," I said, "I am somewhat dazed by the recent action of Mr. Langan, whom I beg, the next time he converts himself into a fulling-mill, to do so at the expense of a man more nearly his equal in strength than I. What your niece has told you is partly true. I am indeed the Cardinal's spy; and I have already reported to him that the miracle is a genuine one. A committee of gentlemen will wait on you tomorrow to verify it, at my suggestion. I have thought that the proof might be regarded by them as more complete if you were taken by surprise. Miss Hickey: that I admire all that is admirable in you is but to say that I have a sense of the beautiful. To say that I love you would be mere profanity. Mr. Langan: I have in my pocket a loaded pistol which I carry from a silly English prejudice against your countrymen. Had I been the Hercules of the ploughtail, and you in my place, I should have been a dead man now. Do not redden: you are safe as far as I am concerned." "Let me tell you before you leave my house for good," said Father Hickey, who seemed to have become unreasonably angry, "that you should never have crossed my threshold if I had known you were a spy: no, not if your uncle were his Holiness the Pope himself." Here a frightful thing happened to me. I felt giddy, and put my hand on my head. Three warm drops trickled over it. I instantly became murderous. My mouth filled with blood; my eyes were blinded with it. My hand went involuntarily to the pistol. It is my habit to obey my impulses instantaneously. Fortunately the impulse to kill vanished before a sudden perception of how I might miraculously humble the mad vanity in which these foolish people had turned upon me. The blood receded from my ears; and I again heard and saw distinctly.