ottom of his cup if he
might be allowed to hope there. But in truth he feared greatly. What
the countess would say to him he thought he could foretell; what it
would behove him to say himself--in matter, though not in words--that
he knew well. Would not the two sayings tally well together? and
could it be right for him even to hope that the love of a girl of
seventeen should stand firm against her mother's will, when her lover
himself could not dare to press his suit? And then another reflection
pressed on his mind sorely. Clara had already given up one poor lover
at her mother's instance; might she not resume that lover, also at
her mother's instance, now that he was no longer poor? What if Owen
Fitzgerald should take from him everything!

And so he walked on through the mud and rain, always swinging his big
stick. Perhaps, after all, the worst of it was over with him, when he
could argue with himself in this way. It is the first plunge into the
cold water that gives the shock. We may almost say that every human
misery will cease to be miserable if it be duly faced; and something
is done towards conquering our miseries, when we face them in any
degree, even if not with due courage. Herbert had taken his plunge
into the deep, dark, cold, comfortless pool of misfortune; and he
felt that the waters around him were very cold. But the plunge had
been taken, and the worst, perhaps, was gone by.

As he approached near to Gortnaclough, he came upon one of those
gangs of road-destroyers who were now at work everywhere, earning
their pittance of "yellow meal" with a pickaxe and a wheelbarrow. In
some sort or other the labourers had been got to their work. Gangsmen
there were with lists, who did see, more or less accurately, that
the men, before they received their sixpence or eightpence for their
day's work, did at any rate pass their day with some sort of tool
in their hands. And consequently the surface of the hill began to
disappear, and there were chasms in the road, which caused those who
travelled on wheels to sit still, staring across with angry eyes, and
sometimes to apostrophize the doer of these deeds with very naughty
words. The doer was the Board of Works, or the "Board" as it was
familiarly termed; and were it not that those ill words must have
returned to the bosoms which vented them, and have flown no further,
no Board could ever have been so terribly curse-laden. To find
oneself at last utterly stopped, after p