A Fair Emigrant, Chapter XXVIII-XXXI [pp. 173-200]

A FAIR EMIGRANT.
Again the wail was prolonged, and Peggy came back from
the door.
"It's no use your stayin' any longer now, ma'am," she said.
"She's begun to rave, and she won't talk to ye no more."
"But I mean to come again, Peggy. I must take her out of
this del."
"Ye'll be clever if ye do that same, ma'am. There's nowhere for her to go but the poor-house, an' the gintlemen would
burn the counthry if ye dared to take her there. Sure herself
would go anywhere, poor lady; but Misther Luke-"
Saying this Peggy signed to her to go, and, picking her steps
to the door, Bawn came face to face with Somerled. She allowed him to help her down the stair and walked out into the
open air with him. How sweet it tasted! How lovely was nature's wilderness after that hideous interior!
"Come out of this place! " were the first words that Fifigall
spoke to her, and, obeying him, she walked silently by his side
till they emerged from the dilapidated gate at one end of the
Hollow into the open fields where grew the yellow lilies round
the sky-blue pools, and where the cattle grazed.
"Are you quite mad?" he asked, suddenly stopping and
looking at her with a blaze of mingled tenderness and anger
lighting up his eyes.
"Why?" asked Bawn quietly. " Do I look very wild?"
"I will not tell you how you look," he said, feeling, indeed,
that he dared not say to her that he had never seen anything
look so sane, wholesome, and beautiful, unless he wanted to start
another quarrel and was prepared to go seeking for another dog
as an excuse for a reconciliation. "It has nothing to do with
the matter. You have been wantonly risking your life in that
ruined house."
"Not wantonly. I have been visiting a fellow-creature in
distress."
"It was not your business. You had no right to go in
there," he continued, with concentrated excitement in his voice.
His eye was still burning, his heart still shuddering at thought
of the danger she had been in.
"I have assumed the right and made it my business," she answered. "At all events, it appears that in doing so I have interfered with no one else, stepped officiously into nobody's shoes.
Oh! I am sick of you," kindling into sudden anger and drawing
back from him a step, "disgusted with the whole country-side
of you! If I had been a man among you I would have walked
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