Almost worst still were the airs which latterly O’Daly had come to assume. Even if the evictions and the rack-renting could have been forgiven, Muirisc felt that his calling himself The O’Daly was unpardonable. Everybody in Ivehagh knew that the O’Dalys had been mere bards and singers for the McCarthys, the O’Mahonys, and other Eugenian houses, and had not been above taking service, later on, under the hatred Carews. That any scion of the sept should exalt himself now, in the shoes of an O’Mahony, was simply intolerable. In proportion as Cormac waxed in importance, his coadjutor Jerry had diminished. There was no longer any talk heard about Diarmid MacEgan; the very pigs in the street knew him now to be plain Jerry Higgins. Only the most shadowy pretense of authority to intermeddle in the affairs of the estate remained to him. Unlettered goodnature and loyalty had stood no chance whatever against the will and powers of the educated Cormac. Muirisc did indeed cherish a nebulous idea that some time or other the popular discontent would find him an effective champion, but Jerry did nothing whatever to encourage this hope. He had grown stout and red-faced through these unoccupied years, and lived by himself in a barely habitable nook among the ruins of the castle, overlooking the churchyard. Here he spent a great deal of his time, behind barred doors and denying himself to all visitors--and Muirisc had long since concluded that the companion of his solitude was a bottle. “I’ve a word more to whisper into your ear, Higgins,” said O’Daly, this very evening, at the conclusion of some unimportant conversation about the mines. The supper had been cleared away, and a tray of glasses flanking a decanter stood on the table at which the speaker sat with his pipe. The buxom and rubicund Mrs. Fergus--for so Muirisc still thought and spoke of her--dozed comfortably in her arm-chair at one side of the bank of blazing peat on the hearth, an open novel turned down on her lap. Opposite her mother, Kate sat and sewed in silence, the while the men talked. It was the room in which The O’Mahony had eaten his first meal in Muirisc, twelve years before. “‘A word to whishper,’” repeated O’Daly, glancing at Jerry with severity from under his beetling black brows, and speaking so loudly that even Mrs. Sullivan in the kitchen might have heard--“times is that hard, and work so scarce, that bechune now and midsummer I’d have ye look about for a new place.” Jerry stared across the table at his co-trustee in blank amazement. It was no surprise to him to be addressed in tones of harsh dislike by O’Daly, or to see his rightful claims to attention contemptuously ignored. But this sweeping suggestion took his breath away. “What place do ye mane?” he asked confusedly. “Where else in Muirisc c’u’d I live so aisily?”