tter since the
famine. What must it have been then? And he thinking only how much
his agent could squeeze from them!"

I could only say he had been bred up in neglect of them, and to think
them impracticable, priest-ridden traitors and murderers. Yes, Lady
Diana had said some of this to Harold already, It was true that they
had shot Mr. Tracy, but Harold had learnt that after a wild, reckless,
spendthrift youth, he had become a Protestant and a violent Orangeman
in the hottest days of party strife, so that he had incurred a special
hatred, which, as far as Harold could see, was not extended to the son,
little as he did for his tenants but show them his careless, gracious
countenance from time to time.

Yet peril for the sake of duty would, as all saw now, have been far
better for Dermot than the alienation from all such calls in which his
mother had brought him up. When her religious influence failed with
him, there was no other restraint. Since he had left the army, he had
been drawn, by those evil geniuses of his, deep into speculations in
training horses for the turf, and his affairs had come into a frightful
state of entanglement, his venture at Doncaster had been unsuccessful,
and plunged him deeper into his difficulties, and then (as I came to
know) Harold's absolute startled amazement how any living man could
screw and starve men, women, and children for the sake of horseflesh,
and his utter contempt for such diversions as he had been shown at the
races, compared with the pleasure of making human beings happy and
improving one's land, had opened Dermot's eyes with very few words.

The thought was not new when the danger of death made him look back on
those wasted years; and resolution began with the dawning of
convalescence, that if he could only free himself from his
entanglements--and terrible complications they were--he would begin a
new life, worthy of having been given back to him. In many a midnight
watch he had spoken of these things, and Harold had soothed him by a
promise to use that accountant's head of his in seeing how to free him
as soon as he was well enough. Biston and the horses would be sold,
and he could turn his mind to his Irish tenants, who, as he already
saw, loved him far better than he deserved. He caught eagerly at the
idea of going out to Australia with Harold, and it did indeed seem that
my brave-hearted nephew was effecting a far greater deliverance for him
than that from th