that, if any one had taken him
in the right way, he might have been kept out of it. Why there was one
talk that he and I had at a picnic on Kalydon Moor, which showed me how
hopeless he was of ever really pleasing or satisfying his mother
without being, what he could never be, like his uncle in his youth, and
how knowing that I cared really might make a difference to him. But
mamma and Lady Diana were both very much vexed about that talk; mamma
was angry with me; and when Dermot, in a poetical game a little after,
sent me some verses--well, with a little more blarney and tenderness
than the case required--there was a real uproar about them. Di showed
them to her mother, who apologised in her lofty way for my having been
insulted. Oh! how angry it did make me; and mamma absolutely cried
about it. It seems foolish to say so, but if they would have let us
alone I could have done something towards inducing him to keep
straight, whereas the way he was treated by his mother and Di only made
him worse. Poor mamma! I don't wonder at her, when even his own mother
and uncle would not stand up for him; but I knew, whenever we met
afterwards at ball or party, that it was pain and grief to her for me
to speak a word to him, and that she thought me wrong to exchange
anything beyond bare civility. He was vexed, too, and did not try; and
we heard worse and worse of him, especially when he went over to his
place in Ireland.

Then came the Crimean war, and all the chances of showing what I knew
he really was; but at the Alma he was wounded, not very dangerously,
but just touching his lungs, and after a long illness in London, the
doctors said he must not go back to Sebastopol, for to serve in the
trenches would be certain death to him. He wanted to go back all the
same, and had an instinct that it would be better for him, but his
mother and uncle prevented him and made him sell out, and after that,
when he had nothing to do--oh! there's no need to think of it.

In the course of this last year he had taken the shooting of Kalydon
Moor, and a house with it, with immense stables, which one of the
Horsmans had made for his hunters, and had ruined himself and died. He
had not quarrelled with his mother--indeed nobody could quarrel with
Dermot--and he used to go over to see her, but he would not live at
home, and since he had been at Biston I had never once met him till I
saw him run up to attack the lion, the only man in all the fai