The two had long since exhausted, in their almost daily talks, every possible phase of this melancholy subject. It was now April of 1879, and the last word received from the absent chief had been a hastily scrawled note dispatched from Adrianople, on New Year’s Day of 1878--when the Turkish army, beaten finally at Plevna and decimated in the Schipka, were doggedly moving backward toward the Bosphorus. Since that, there had been absolute silence--and Kate and Murphy had alike, hoping against hope, come long since to fear the worst. Though each strove to sustain confidence in the other, there was no secret between their hearts as to what both felt. “Murphy,” said Kate, rousing herself all at once from her reverie, “there’s something I’ve been keeping from you--and I can’t hold it anny longer. Do ye mind when Malachy wint away last winter?” “Faith I do,” replied the boatman. (Malachy, be it explained, had followed The O’Mahony in all his wanderings up to the autumn of 1870, when, in a skirmish shortly after Sedan, he had lost an arm and, upon his release from the hospital, had been sent back to Muirisc.) “I mind that he wint to Amerriky.” “Well, thin,” whispered Kate, bending forward as if the very waves had ears, “it’s just that he didn’t do. I gave him money, and I gave him the O’Mahony’s ring, and sint him to search the world over till he came upon his master, or his master’s grave--and I charged him to say only this: ‘Come back to Muirisc! ’Tis Kate O’Mahony wants you!’ And now no one knows this but me confessor and you.” The boatman gazed earnestly into her face. “An’ why for did ye say: ‘Come back?’” he asked. “Ah thin--well--‘tis O’Daly’s hard d’alin’s wid the tinants, and the failure of the potatoes these two years and worse ahead and the birth of me little step-brother--and--” “Answer me now, Katie darlint?” the old man adjured her, with glowing eyes and solemn voice. “Is it the convint ye’re afraid of for yoursilf? Is it of your own free will you’re goin’ to take your vows?” The girl had answered this question more than once before, and readily enough. Now, for some reason which she could not have defined to herself, she looked down upon the gliding water at her side, and meditatively dipped her fingers into it, and let a succession of little waves fling their crests up into her sleeve--and said nothing at all. CHAPTER XVIII--THE GREAT O’DALY USURPATION.