h to see the whole of a matter, or his little mouth open wide
enough to speak it. If he owed a guinea, he would only pay a pound of
it, and trust to your forgetting the rest. If his boat wanted painting,
he would give it one coat and save the other. If his horse wanted
shoeing, he would give him three new shoes, and use an old one for the
fourth. If he ever gave money, it was by way of a bargain; and if he
ever took up a cause, good or bad, it was grudgingly, and in a way which
robbed his support of all graciousness.

It took me some months to discover all this about my new master.

When first I found myself an inmate of Knockowen, I was so sore with
disappointment and anger that I cared about nothing and nobody. His
honour, whose professions of interest in me were, as I well knew, all
hollow, concerned himself very little about my well-being under his
roof. Why he had taken me at all I could not guess. But I was sure,
whatever the reason, it was because it suited his interest, not mine. I
was handed over to the stables, and there they made a sort of groom of
me; and presently, because I was a handy lad, I was fetched indoors when
company was present, and set to wait at table in a livery coat.

The Knockowen household was a small one, consisting only of his honour
and Mistress Gorman and the young lady. Mistress Gorman was a sad
woman, who had little enough pleasure in this world, and that not of her
husband's making. The man and his wife were almost strangers, meeting
only at meal-times, and not always then, to exchange a few formal words,
and then separate, one to her lonely chamber, the other to his grounds.

The brightness of the house was all centred in my little lady Kit, who
was as remote from her mother's sadness as she was from her father's
meanness. From the first she made my life at Knockowen tolerable, and
very soon she made it necessary.

I shall not soon forget my first meeting with her. She had been away on
a visit when I arrived, and a week later I was ordered to take the boat
over to Rathmullan to fetch her home.

It was a long, toilsome journey, in face of a contrary wind, against
which the boat travelled slowly, and frequently not without the help of
an oar. How I groaned as I beat to and fro up the lough, and how I
wished I was away with Tim and father on the _Cigale_.

At last, late in the afternoon, I reached Rathmullan, and made fast my
boat to the pier. I was to call at the in