y was then spent over them--hours
that cost poor Dermot more than he was equal to; but his mind was made
up, as he told me, "to face anything rather than go on in the old
miserable way." It was much that he had learnt to think it miserable.

Lady Diana was not much obliged to Harold. She could not think why her
patient was so often left out of spirits, and with a headache after
those visits, while he was in a feverish state of anxiety about them,
that made it worse to put them off than to go through with them; and
then, when she had found out the cause, the family pride much disliked
letting an outsider into his involvments, and she thought their
solicitor would have done the thing much better.

Poor woman, it was hard that, when she thought illness was bringing her
son back to her, she found his confidence absorbed by the
"bush-ranger," whom she never liked nor trusted, and his reformation,
if reformation it were to prove, not at all conducted on her views of
visible repentance and conversion. Dermot was responsive to her
awakened tenderness, but he was perversely reticent as to whether
repentance or expedience prompted him. She required so much religious
demonstration, that she made him shrink from manifesting his real
feelings as "humbug," and Viola knew far more that his repentance was
real than she did. Those proofs of true repentance--confession and
restitution--I am sure he gave, and that most bravely, when, after
weeks of weary and sorrowful work on Harold's part and his, the whole
was sufficiently disentangled to make a lucid statement of his affairs.

He made up his mind to make an arrangement with his creditors, giving
up Biston, all his horses--everything, in fact, but Killy Marey, which
was entailed on his Tracy cousins. And this second year of George
Yolland's management had made the shares in the Hydriot Company of so
much value, that the sale of them would complete the clearance of his
obligations. The full schedule of his debts, without reserve, and the
estimate of his means of paying them off, was then given by Dermot to
his mother, and sent to his uncle, who went over them with his
solicitor.

Lady Diana writhed under the notion of selling Biston. It seemed to
her to be the means of keeping her son from the place in Ireland, which
she disliked more than ever, and she hoped her brother would advance
enough to prevent this from being needful; but for this Lord Erymanth
was far too wise. He