‘Next to life, unquestionably; but one condition of health is to be alive, and I don’t see how to manage that. Look here, Dick, I have just had a quarrel with my father; he is an excellent man and an impressive preacher, but he fails in the imaginative qualities. Nature has been a niggard to him in inventiveness. He is the minister of a little parish called Aghadoe, in the North, where they give him two hundred and ten pounds per annum. There are eight in family, and he actually does not see his way to allow me one hundred and fifty out of it. That’s the way they neglect arithmetic in our modern schools!’ ‘Has he reduced your allowance?’ ‘He has done more, he has extinguished it.’ ‘Have you provoked him to this?’ ‘I have provoked him to it.’ ‘But is it not possible to accommodate matters? It should not be very difficult, surely, to show him that once you are launched in life--’ ‘And when will that be, Dick?’ broke in the other. ‘I have been on the stocks these four years, and that launching process you talk of looks just as remote as ever. No, no; let us be fair; he has all the right on his side, all the wrong is on mine. Indeed, so far as conscience goes, I have always felt it so, but one’s conscience, like one’s boots, gets so pliant from wear, that it ceases to give pain. Still, on my honour, I never hip-hurraed to a toast that I did not feel: there goes broken boots to one of the boys, or, worse again, the cost of a cotton dress for one of the sisters. Whenever I took a sherry-cobbler I thought of suicide after it. Self-indulgence and self-reproach got linked in my nature so inseparably, it was hopeless to summon one without the other, till at last I grew to believe it was very heroic in me to deny myself nothing, seeing how sorry I should be for it afterwards. But come, old fellow, don’t lose your evening; we’ll have time enough to talk over these things--where are you going?’ ‘To the Clancys’.’ ‘To be sure; what a fellow I am to forget it was Letty’s birthday, and I was to have brought her a bouquet! Dick, be a good fellow and tell her some lie or other--that I was sick in bed, or away to see an aunt or a grandmother, and that I had a splendid bouquet for her, but wouldn’t let it reach her through other hands than my own, but to-morrow--to-morrow she shall have it.’ ‘You know well enough you don’t mean anything of the sort.’ ‘On my honour, I’ll keep my promise. I’ve an old silver watch yonder--I think it knows the way to the pawn-office by itself. There, now be off, for if I begin to think of all the fun you’re going to, I shall just dress and join you.’ ‘No, I’d not do that,’ said Dick gravely, ‘nor shall I stay long myself. Don’t go to bed, Joe, till I come back. Good-bye.’ ‘Say all good and sweet things to Letty for me. Tell her--’ Kearney did not wait for his message, but hurried down the steps and drove off.