'A pretty day's work of it you have made, Master Redmond,' said he.
'What! you a friend to the Bradys, and knowing your uncle to be
distressed for money, try and break off a match which will bring
fifteen hundred a year into the family? Quin has promised to pay off
the four thousand pounds which is bothering your uncle so. He takes
a girl without a penny--a girl with no more beauty than yonder
bullock. Well, well, don't look furious; let's say she IS handsome--
there's no accounting for tastes,--a girl that has been flinging
herself at the head of every man in these parts these ten years
past, and MISSING them all. And you, as poor as herself, a boy of
fifteen--well, sixteen, if you insist--and a boy who ought to be
attached to your uncle as to your father'--

'And so I am,' said I.

'And this is the return you make him for his kindness! Didn't he
harbour you in his house when you were an orphan, and hasn't he
given you rent-free your fine mansion of Barryville yonder? And now,
when his affairs can be put into order, and a chance offers for his
old age to be made comfortable, who flings himself in the way of him
and competence?--You, of all others; the man in the world most
obliged to him. It's wicked, ungrateful, unnatural. From a lad of
such spirit as you are, I expect a truer courage.'

'I am not afraid of any man alive,' exclaimed I (for this latter
part of the Captain's argument had rather staggered me, and I
wished, of course, to turn it--as one always should when the enemy's
too strong); 'and it's _I_ am the injured man, Captain Fagan. No man
was ever, since the world began, treated so. Look here--look at this
riband. I've worn it in my heart for six months. I've had it there