‘No, no. Confound it!’ he would say to himself. ‘Aunt Betty loves me, and money has no share in the affection I bear her. If she knew I must be her heir, she’d say so frankly and freely. She’d scorn the notion of doling out to me as benevolence what one day would be my own by right. She is proud and intolerant enough, but she is seldom unjust--never so willingly and consciously. If, then, she has not said O’Shea’s Barn must be mine some time, it is because she knows well it cannot be true. Besides, this very last step of hers, this haughty dismissal of me from her house, implies the possession of a power which she would not dare to exercise if she were but a life-tenant of the property. Last of all, had she speculated ever so remotely on my being the proprietor of Irish landed property, it was most unlikely she would so strenuously have encouraged me to pursue my career as an Austrian soldier, and turn all my thoughts to my prospects under the Empire.’ In fact, she never lost the opportunity of reminding him how unfit he was to live in Ireland or amongst Irishmen. Such reflections as I have briefly hinted at here took him some time to arrive at, for his thoughts did not come freely, or rapidly make place for others. The sum of them, however, was that he was thrown upon the world, and just at the very threshold of life, and when it held out its more alluring prospects. There is something peculiarly galling to the man who is wincing under the pang of poverty to find that the world regards him as rich and well off, and totally beyond the accidents of fortune. It is not simply that he feels how his every action will be misinterpreted and mistaken, and a spirit of thrift, if not actual shabbiness, ascribed to all that he does, but he also regards himself as a sort of imposition or sham, who has gained access to a place he has no right to occupy, and to associate on terms of equality with men of tastes and habits and ambitions totally above his own. It was in this spirit he remembered Nina’s chance expression, ‘I don’t suppose _you_ want money!’ There could be no other meaning in the phrase than some foregone conclusion about his being a man of fortune. Of course she acquired this notion from those around her. As a stranger to Ireland, all she knew, or thought she knew, had been conveyed by others. ‘I don’t suppose _you_ want money’ was another way of saying, ‘You are your aunt’s heir. You are the future owner of the O’Shea estates. No vast property, it is true; but quite enough to maintain the position of a gentleman.’ ‘Who knows how much of this Lord Kilgobbin or his son Dick believed?’ thought he. ‘But certainly my old playfellow Kate has no faith in the matter, or if she have, it has little weight with her in her estimate of me.