was lost to him forever; and, unable to bear up against the
unexpected stroke of fortune, he feigned illness and withdrew.

It is very difficult for some men to sever the pain of a disappointment
from a sense of injury towards the innocent cause of it. Unwilling to
confess that they have calculated ill, they turn their anger into some
channel apart from themselves. In the present case Fagan felt as if my
father had done him a foul wrong, as though he had been a party to the
deceit he practised on himself, and had actually traded on the hopes
which stirred his own heart. He hastened home, and, passing through the
little shop, entered the dingy parlor behind it.

At a large, high desk, at each side of which stood innumerable
pigeon-holes, crammed with papers, a very diminutive man was seated
writing. His suit of snuff-brown was worn and threadbare, but
scrupulously clean, as was also the large cravat of spotless white
which enclosed his neck like a pillory. His age might have been about
fifty-one or two; some might have guessed him more, for his features
were cramped and contracted with wrinkles, which, with the loss of one
of his eyes from small-pox, made him appear much older than he was. His
father had been one of the first merchants of Dublin, in whose ruin and
bankruptcy, it was said, Fagan's father had a considerable share. The
story also ran that Joe Raper--such was his name--had been the accepted
suitor of her who subsequently married Fagan. The marriage having been
broken off when these disasters became public, young Raper was forced
by poverty to relinquish his career as a student of Trinity College,
and become a clerk in Fagan's office and an inmate of his house. In this
station he had passed youth and manhood, and was now growing old;
his whole ambition in life being to see the daughter of his former
sweetheart grow up in beauty and accomplishments, and to speculate with
himself on some great destiny in store for her. Polly's mother had
died within two years after her marriage, and to her child had Joe
transmitted all the love and affection he had borne to herself. He had
taken charge of her education from infancy, and had labored hard himself
to acquire such knowledge as might keep him in advance of his gifted
pupil. But for this self-imposed task it is more than likely that all
his little classic lore had been long forgotten, and that the graceful
studies of his earlier days had been obliterated by the wear