I know you have tould her everything, or she wouldn't act towards me as she has done of late." Sarah stood like the Pythoness, in a kind of savage beauty, with the knife firmly grasped in her hand.
"I'm glad she's gone," she said; "but it's not her, father, that I ought to raise my hand against." "Who then, Sarah ?" he asked, with something like surprise.
"You asked me," she proceeded, "to assist in a plan to have Mave Sullivan carried off by young Dick o' the Grange--I'm now ready for anything, and I'll do it.

This world, father, has nothing good or happy in it for me--now I'll be aquil to it; if it gives me nothing good, it'll get nothing out of me.

I'll give it blow for blow; kindness, good fortune, if it was to happen--but it can't now--would soften me; but I know, I feel that ill-treatment, crosses, disappointments, an' want of all hope in this life, has made, an' will make me a devil--ay, an' oh! what a different girl I might be this day!" "What has vexed you ?" asked the father "for I see that something has." "Isn't it a cruel thing," she proceeded, without seeming to have attended to him; "isn't it a cruel thing to think that every one you see about you has some happiness except yourself; an' that your heart is burstin', an' your brain burnin', an' no relief for you; no one point to turn to, for consolation--but everything dark and dismal, and fiery about you ?" "I feel all this myself," said the Prophet; "so, don't be disheartened, Sarah; in the coorse o' time your heart will get so hardened that you'll laugh at the world--ay, at all that's either bad or good in it, as I do." "I never wish to come to that state," she replied; "an' you never felt what I feel--you never had that much of what was good in your heart.
No," she proceeded, "sooner than come to that state--that is, to your state--I'd put this knife into my heart.

You, father, never loved one of your own kind yet." "Didn't I ?" he replied, while his eyes lightened into a glare like those of a provoked tiger; "ay, I loved one of our kind--of your kind; loved her--ay, an' was happy wid her--oh, how happy.

Ah, Sarah M'Gowan, an' I loved my fellow-creatures then, too, like a fool as I was: loved, ay, loved; an' she that I so loved proved false to me--proved an adulteress; an' I tell you now, that it may harden your heart against the world, that that woman--my wife--that I so loved, an' that so disgraced me, was your mother." "It's a lie--it's as false as the devil himself," she replied, turning round quickly, and looking him with frantic vehemence of manner in the face.