“I felt altogether desperate one night, Miss Desmond,” he said, “when my poor mother was at her worst, and my father sitting in the kitchen as helpless as a child,--almost daft, as they say in the north. I felt desperate somehow, and I went out of the house and ran all the way to Tredethlyn Grange, and asked my uncle Oliver to lend me the money. He laughed in my face, Miss Desmond, and told me he hadn’t a five-pound note in the house; and I dare say he spoke the truth, for I think he’d have gone half crazy at the thought of a sovereign lying idle. I went back to the farm, and--my mother died the next day.” He stopped, and sat for some minutes looking at Mr. Hillary’s Axminster carpet. Julia did not say anything. She was too perfect a tactician not to know that anything she could say must appear commonplace at such a moment. She only drew a long breath, a kind of fluttering sigh, expressive of the deepest sympathy. “My mother died, Miss Desmond,” the young man went on; “and my father was not slow to follow her. So, having no one in the world to care for, except--except a cousin, who had been like a sister to me, I ran away to Falmouth, and enlisted in a foot regiment, thinking that I had but to pin a bunch of colours in my hat and march straight off to some field of battle. I left Cornwall, Miss Desmond; but I never forgot that night before my mother’s death. I’ve tried to feel grateful to my uncle Oliver for leaving me this fortune, but I can’t. I ought to feel grateful, I suppose; but I can’t. The memory of that night sours me, somehow. Money seems such paltry stuff, after all, when you think that all the golden coin in this world can’t bring back one human creature from the grave.” “Ah, yes, indeed,” Miss Desmond murmured, in her tenderest voice. And then, being blest with a very lively imagination, she found herself wondering whether, if wealth had been potent to restore the dead, and she had been possessed with wealth, she would have very much cared to awaken Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond from his quiet slumber in a little churchyard beside the winding Shannon. The old soldier of fortune was better in his grave perhaps, Julia thought, philosophically. She had begun to fight the battle of life on her own tactics, and had no very great opinion of her late father’s strategy.