at the clubhouse, hears the last warning wail, 'For my sake, for your own--that you may be spared this torment!' and then she lights a lamp and reads angrily till daylight--loathing herself for what her sound sense condemns as morbidness--lest peradventure her thoughts should drive her mad. Then rising with a headache and haggard looks, she sits in the window-seat and feeds the hounds, and reflects with stern satisfaction that the odious baggage who lives in the Little House has never found joints in her armour--has never caught her tripping with regard to her younger son. Since my lord's death no spiteful unduly-elected guardian could complain of the boy's treatment. Her purse had always been open to him; from childhood he was rich in guns and ponies. But she failed sufficiently to consider that there was one thing for which the warm-hearted lad had pined and which she had consistently denied him--love. It is evident that we cannot bestow that which we have not to give. This reproach therefore sat lightly on her mind. The deficit in affection was made up with bank-notes, and she bred unconsciously in her second-born a recklessness in spending which his after-income would by no means justify. Her influence over him was small. Not that this mattered much, for he was a bright good-natured lad, such as give little serious trouble to their elders. He had a way of quarrelling with Shane though, which opened dread visions of possible complications in the future. Sometimes the brothers were so near the point of open rupture, that milady had to interfere, and then with undutiful fierceness my lord would remind her of the oath she had herself extorted, and she would be stricken dumb, cursing herself for the idle folly of the act. If my lady nourished old-fashioned feudal views about the conduct of one brother to another, she was clumsy in her method of realising them. Terence ignored the whole proceeding, and to prove his freedom kept the household in a constant state of simmering breeziness, which was more lively than comfortable. Shane, on the other hand, was disposed to be benignant if Terence would abstain from being rude. There was little in common between the two, and it would have been odd if Shane had kept his temper when Terence flogged his horse-boy, though he had a private young henchman of his own. My lady looked with uneasiness at the constant trivial squabblings, and was not altogether sorry, as the twain grew up, to see that their tastes divided them, that they met less and less; for Shane became engrossed with the pleasures of the capital, while Curran, taking a fancy for the second son, turned his attention to the Bar.