Here I flung myself on the turf and waited impatiently for daylight.
It came at last, and at its first glow I took the packet from my pocket.
The small outer paper addressed to me was in Tim's hand, and was very brief.

"Dear Barry," it said, "I searched as I promised, and have read this letter.

Time enough when Ireland's business is done to attend to yours and mine .-- Tim." From this I turned with trembling curiosity to the packet itself, and took from it a faded paper, written in a strange, uncultured hand, but signed at the end with my mother's feeble signature, and dated a month after Tim's and my birth.
This is the strange matter it contained:-- "I, Mary Gallagher, being at the point of death,"-- that was as she then supposed, but she lived many a year after, as the reader knows--"and as I hope for mercy from God, into whose presence I am summoned, declare that the girl-child who was buried beside my Mistress Gorman was not hers but mine.

My twins were the boy who lives and the girl who died.
My lady's child is the boy who passes as twin-brother to mine.

It was Maurice Gorman led me to this wrong.