She returned to M'Carthy with the same caution, and, approaching him, was about to speak, when dread of her husband supervened for the moment, and she paused like a person in doubt.

The peculiar glare and the satanic smile which her husband gave to Mogue, who, by the way, seemed perfectly to understand it, oppressed her with an indistinct sense of approaching evil which she could neither shake off, nor separate from the strange gentleman to whom their glances evidently referred.

She remembered also to have heard her husband say upon one occasion when he was drunk, that Mogue Moylan was the deepest villain in the barony--ay, or in the kingdom; and that only for his cowardice he would be a man after his own heart.

'Twas true, she knew that he had contradicted all this afterwards when he got sober, and said it was the liquor that caused him to speak as he did, that Mogue was a good kind-hearted crature, who loved truth, and was one of the most religious boys among them.
This, however, did not satisfy her; the impression of some meditated evil against their temporary guest was too strong to be disregarded, and on recollecting that Mogue had been up with her husband only the evening but one before, as if to prepare him for something unusual, the conviction arose to an alarming height.
We have said that this woman was a poor passive creature, whose life was a mere round of almost mechanical action.

This, to be sure, so far as regarded her own domestic duties, and in general every matter in which her husband's opinions and her own could clash, was perfectly true.