zgeralds; but how shall
I succeed in exciting their sympathy for this other family of the
Molletts? And yet why not? If we are to sympathise only with the
good, or worse still, only with the graceful, how little will there
be in our character that is better than terrestrial? Those Molletts
also were human, and had strings to their hearts, at which the world
would now probably pull with sufficient vigour. For myself I can
truly say that my strongest feeling is for their wretchedness.

The father and son had more than once boasted among themselves that
the game they were now playing was a high one; that they were, in
fact, gambling for mighty stakes. And in truth, as long as the
money came in to them--flowing in as the result of their own craft
in this game--the excitement had about it something that was very
pleasurable. There was danger, which makes all games pleasant; there
was money in handfuls for daily expenses--those daily wants of the
appetite, which are to such men more important by far than the
distant necessities of life; there was a possibility of future
grandeur, an opening out of magnificent ideas of fortune, which
charmed them greatly as they thought about it. What might they not
do with forty thousand pounds divided between them, or even with a
thousand a year each, settled on them for life? and surely their
secret was worth that money! Nay, was it not palpable to the meanest
calculation that it was worth much more? Had they not the selling
of twelve thousand a year for ever and ever to this family of
Fitzgerald?

But for the last fortnight things had begun to go astray with them.
Money easily come by goes easily, and money badly come by goes badly.
Theirs had come easily and badly, and had so gone. What necessity
could there be for economy with such a milch-cow as that close to
their elbows? So both of them had thought, if not argued; and there
had been no economy--no economy in the use of that very costly
amusement, the dice-box; and now, at the present moment, ready money
having failed to be the result of either of the two last visits to
Castle Richmond, the family funds were running low.

It may be said that ready money for the moment was the one desire
nearest to the heart of Mollett pere, when he took that last journey
over the Boggeragh mountains--ready money wherewith to satisfy the
pressing claims of Miss O'Dwyer, and bring back civility, or rather
servility, to the face and manner of Tom the