en I shall have learned to interest myself in the things money
brings around a man; perhaps, too, when I can forget,--ay, that was
the lesson was hardest of all." All these passing thoughts, a good
deal dashed through each other, scarcely contributed to enlighten his
faculties; and he rambled on over rocks and yellow strand, up hillsides,
and through fern-clad valleys, not in the least mindful of whither he
was going.

At last he suddenly halted, and saw he was in the shrubberies of Lyle
Abbey, his steps having out of old habit taken the one same path they
had followed for many a year. The place was just as he had seen it last.
Trees make no marvellous progress in the north of Ireland, and a longer
absence than Tony's would leave them just as they were before. All
was neat, orderly, and well kept; and the heaps of dried leaves and
brushwood ready to be wheeled away, stood there as he saw them when he
last walked that way with Alice. He was poor then, without a career,
or almost a hope of one; and yet it was possible, could it be possible,
that he was happier then than he now felt? Was it that love sufficed for
all, and that the heart so filled had no room for other thoughts
than those of her it worshipped? He certainly had loved her greatly.
She,--she alone made up that world in which he had lived. Her smile, her
step, her laugh, her voice,--ay, there they were, all before him. What a
dream it was! Only a dream, after all; for she never cared for him.
She had led him on to love her, half in caprice, half in a sort of
compassionate interest for a poor boy,--boy she called him,--to whom a
passion for one above him was certain to elevate and exalt him in his
own esteem. "Very kind, doubtless," muttered he, "but very cruel too.
She might have remembered that this same dream was to have a very rough
awaking. I had built nearly every hope upon one, and that one, she well
knew, was never to be realized. It might not have been the most gracious
way to do it, but I declare it would have been the most merciful, to
have treated me as her mother did, who snubbed my pretensions at once.
It was all right that I should recognize her superiority over me in a
hundred ways; but perhaps she should not have kept it so continually in
mind, as a sort of barrier against a warmer feeling for me. I suppose
this is the fine-lady view of the matter. This is the theory that young
fellows are to be civilized, as they call it, by a passion for a woma