little lodging in Dublin, and hope that the attorneys of that litigious city might be good to him.  On his journey home he made but one resolution.  He would make the change, or attempt to make it, with manly strength.  During his last month in London he had allowed himself to be sad, depressed, and melancholy.  There should be an end of all that now.  Nobody at home should see that he was depressed.  And Mary, his own Mary, should at any rate have no cause to think that her love and his own engagement had ever been the cause to him of depression.  Did he not value her love more than anything in the world?  A thousand times he told himself that he did.

She was there in the old house at Killaloe to greet him.  Her engagement was an affair known to all the county, and she had no idea that it would become her to be coy in her love.  She was in his arms before he had spoken to his father and mother, and had made her little speech to him,—­very inaudibly indeed,—­while he was covering her sweet face with kisses.  “Oh, Phineas, I am so proud of you; and I think you are so right, and I am so glad you have done it.”  Again he covered her face with kisses.  Could he ever have had such satisfaction as this had he allowed Madame Goesler’s hand to remain in his?

On the first night of his arrival he sat for an hour downstairs with his father talking over his plans.  He felt,—­he could not but feel,—­that he was not the hero now that he had been when he was last at Killaloe,—­when he had come thither with a Cabinet Minister under his wing.  And yet his father did his best to prevent the growth of any such feeling.  The old doctor was not quite as well off as he had been when Phineas first started with his high hopes for London.  Since that day he had abandoned his profession and was now living on the fruits of his life’s labour.  For the last two years he had been absolved from the necessity of providing an income for his son, and had probably allowed himself to feel that no such demand upon him would again be made.  Now, however, it was necessary that he should do so.  Could his son manage to live on two hundred a-year?  There would then be four hundred a-year left for the wants of the family at home.  Phineas swore that he could fight his battle on a hundred and fifty, and they ended the argument by splitting the difference.  He had been paying exactly the same sum of money for the rooms he had just left in London; but then, while he held those rooms, his income had been two thousand a-year.  Tenant-right was a very fine thing, but could it be worth such a fall as this?

“And about dear Mary?” said the father.

“I hope it may not be very long,” said Phineas.

“I have not spoken to her about it, but your mother says that Mrs. Flood Jones is very averse to a long engagement.”

“What can I do?  She would not wish me to marry her daughter with no other income than an allowance made by you.”