The poor, pretty wife was then a year dead, but he knew all about Dominick’s people. The Rector himself came of a good old Irish family, and his wife had been even more highly connected. Indeed, the lad who came to Mr. Barry four years ago, though he had inherited little from his father, would in all probability succeed to his uncle’s title and five or six thousand a year—a small thing for a baronet, but, still, worth having. Of course, there was always a chance that the uncle, a middle-aged man, might marry, though he was consumptive and generally an invalid; but all that lay in the future, and at present it was decided that the boy should be given a profession; but having proved remarkably idle and wild at school—though nothing disgraceful was ever laid to his charge—his uncle in one of his intervals of good health had desired that he should be sent down to Mr. Barry, for whom Sir Spencer Fitzgerald had an immense respect and a little fear, for a few reasons that need not be specified, though, if Sir Spencer only knew it, the Rector was the last man in the world to betray the secrets of anyone. The Rector accepted the charge gladly. He had passed several young men (who had been private pupils of his before his marriage) very successfully for the Civil Service, and he was doing his best for Dominick now, whom from the very first he liked, in spite of the reputation for idleness that came with him. Indeed, Dom Fitzgerald had fallen into the family circle as though it had been made for him, and had grown to be quite a brother to his new-found cousins. He at once grew fond of Susan, and became on the spot a chum of Carew’s, who was reading with his father for the army and expected to pass next year. And he quarrelled all day long with Betty, who accepted him as a ‘pal’ from the moment of his appearing. Betty inclined towards slang. As for the children, they all loved him; and, indeed, it must be said that he loved them, and spent a considerable amount of the fifty pounds allowed him for yearly pocket-money upon them. ‘Well, where is she?’ persists he, turning a lazy eye from one to another, at last resting it on Susan. ‘She has gone down to Father Murphy’s about Jane,’ says Susan reluctantly. ‘You know Jane is always breaking everything, and to-day she broke that old cup of our great-grandmother’s, and Aunt Jemima was very angry. She has gone to tell Father Murphy about it, and to say she will never take a Roman Catholic servant again unless he punishes Jane severely.’ ‘And Father Murphy will laugh,’ says Carew, with a shrug. ‘He knows she must take Catholic servants or do without them. All the Protestant girls of that class here are farmers’ daughters, and either won’t go into service at all, or else only to Lady O’Donovan’s or the O’Connors’.’