unless, indeed, his wife did know. But so it was. He had, one may
say, all that a kind fortune could give him. He had a wife who was
devoted to him; he had a son on whom he doted, and of whom all men
said all good things; he had two sweet, happy daughters; he had a
pleasant house, a fine estate, position and rank in the world. Had
it so pleased him, he might have sat in Parliament without any of
the trouble, and with very little of the expense, which usually
attends aspirants for that honour. And, as it was, he might hope to
see his son in Parliament within a year or two. For among other
possessions of the Fitzgerald family was the land on which stands
the borough of Kilcommon, a borough to which the old Reform Bill was
merciful, as it was to so many others in the south of Ireland.

Why, then, should Sir Thomas Fitzgerald be a silent, melancholy man,
confining himself for the last year or two almost entirely to his
own study; giving up to his steward the care even of his own demesne
and farm; never going to the houses of his friends, and rarely
welcoming them to his; rarely as it was, and never as it would have
been, had he been always allowed to have his own way?

People in the surrounding neighbourhood had begun to say that Sir
Thomas's sorrow had sprung from shortness of cash, and that money
was not so easily to be had at Castle Richmond now-a-days as was the
case some ten years since. If this were so, the dearth of that very
useful article could not have in any degree arisen from
extravagance. It was well known that Sir Thomas's estate was large,
being of a value, according to that public and well-authenticated
rent-roll which the neighbours of a rich man always carry in their
heads, amounting to twelve or fourteen thousand a-year. Now Sir
Thomas had come into the unencumbered possession of this at an early