Dick Kearney walked the bog from early morning till dark without firing a shot. The snipe rose almost at his feet, and wheeling in circles through the air, dipped again into some dark crevice of the waste, unnoticed by him! One thought only possessed, and never left him, as he went. He had overheard Nina’s words to his sister, as he made his escape over the fence, and learned how she promised to ‘spare him’; and that if not worried about him, or asked to pledge herself, she should be ‘merciful,’ and not entangle the boy in a hopeless passion. He would have liked to have scoffed at the insolence of this speech, and treated it as a trait of overweening vanity; he would have gladly accepted her pity as a sort of challenge, and said, ‘Be it so; let us see who will come safest out of this encounter,’ and yet he felt in his heart he could not. First of all, her beauty had really dazzled him, and the thousand graces of a manner of which he had known nothing captivated and almost bewildered him. He could not reply to her in the same tone he used to any other. If he fetched her a book or a chair, he gave it with a sort of deference that actually reacted on himself, and made him more gentle and more courteous, for the time. ‘What would this influence end in making me?’ was his question to himself. ‘Should I gain in sentiment or feeling? Should I have higher and nobler aims? Should I be anything of that she herself described so glowingly, or should I only sink to a weak desire to be her slave, and ask for nothing better than some slight recognition of my devotion? I take it that she would say the choice lay with _her_, and that I should be the one or the other as she willed it, and though I would give much to believe her wrong, my heart tells me that I cannot. I came down here resolved to resist any influence she might attempt to have over me. Her likeness showed me how beautiful she was, but it could not tell me the dangerous fascination of her low liquid voice, her half-playful, half-melancholy smile, and that bewitching walk, with all its stately grace, so that every fold as she moves sends its own thrill of ecstasy. And now that I know all these, see and feel them, I am told that to me they can bring no hope! That I am too poor, too ignoble, too undistinguished, to raise my eyes to such attraction. I am nothing, and must live and die nothing. ‘She is candid enough, at all events. There is no rhapsody about her when she talks of poverty. She chronicles every stage of the misery, as though she had felt them all; and how unlike it she looks! There is an almost insolent well-being about her that puzzles me. She will not heed this, or suffer that, because it looks mean. Is this the subtle worship she offers Wealth, and is it thus she offers up her prayer to Fortune?