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114 during the time that he was so poor. He used often to get leather on credit from Dermot, and perhaps the poor fellow thought that if he were to marry Sive he would have a dry and full hearth, whatever happened, and whatever other comfort he might have or lack."

"I'll engage," said the priest, "that there was no fear of her marrying him then. But all the same, perhaps she wouldn't object to accepting the promise from him. There are no bounds to people like her, when once they take to trickery and cheating and telling lies."

"I declare to you. Father," said John Kittach, "that I believe you are right. Still, there is a good deal in it that is hard to understand. The day he was back at my house, he said he wanted to speak a couple of words to Mary. It seemed to me that he had hardly had time to enter the house when he was gone. If he spoke at all he didn't speak more than the two words. He went off like a bird. Whatever he said, I never saw such a change in any Christian as there was in her from that time forward. Her appetite and her colour returned. The languor and dulness departed; very soon her voice was as full of life and her laugh was as ringing as any laugh I ever heard from her mother in her youngest days. If he told her that he had made a promise to Sive, it is hard to suppose that that would raise the gloom from her heart as it was raised. I should have thought its effect would have been to plunge her into absolute melancholy."

"Upon my word and credit, John," said the priest, "you surprise me very much indeed. The day he came here to speak to me I thought of course