‘I miss you sorely, my boy,’ it said; ‘I know the more what a support and friend you have been to me now that you are so far away; but all is made up to me in knowing you to be among my own people, and the instrument of reconciliation with my brother, as you well know how great has been the pain of the estrangement caused by my own pride and wilfulness. I cannot tell you how glad I am that he approves of you, and that you are beginning to get used to the work that was my own poor father’s for so long. Bred up as you have been, my mountain lad, I scarcely dared to hope that you would be able to sit down quietly to it, with all our hopes of making you a scholar so suddenly frustrated; but I might have put faith in your loving heart and sense of duty to carry you through anything. I feel as if a load were off my mind since you and Bryan are so happily launched. The boy has not once applied for money since he joined; and if you write to him, pray beg him to be careful, for it would well-nigh drive your father mad to be pressed any more--the poor mare has been sold at a dead loss and the Carrick-humbug quarry company pays no dividends, so how we are to meet the Christmas bills I cannot guess. But, as you remember, we have won over worse times, and now Providence has been so good to you and Bryan, what have I to do but be thankful and hope the best.’ Ulick watched her face, and gave her another note, saying mournfully, ‘You see they all, but my mother, think, that if I am dragging our family honour through the mire, I’ve got something by it. Poor Bryan, he knows no better--he’s younger than me by two years.’ The young ensign made a piteous confession of the first debt he had been able to contract, for twenty pounds, with a promise that if his brother would help him out of this one scrape, he would never run into another. ‘I am very sorry for you, Ulick,’ said Albinia, ‘and I hate to advise you to be selfish, but it really is quite impossible for you to be paymaster for all your brothers’ debts.’ ‘If it were Connel, I know it would be of no use,’ said Ulick. ‘But Bryan--you see he has got a start--they gave him a commission, and he is the finest fellow of us all, and knows what his word is, and keeps it! Maybe, if I get on, I may be able to save, and help him to his next step, and then if Redmond could get to college, my mother would be a happy woman, and all thanks to my uncle.’ ‘Then it is this twenty pounds that is pinching you now? Is that it?’ ‘You see my uncle said he would give me enough to keep me as a gentleman and his nephew, but not enough to keep all the family, as he said. After my Christmas quarter I shall be up in the world again, and then there will be time to think of the woman you spoke of--a Connaught woman, did you say?’ When Albinia reported this dialogue to her husband, he was much moved by this simple self-abnegation.