ffling blasts, back again across the breadth of Ireland. The road was
all strewn for him with the wreckage of his shattered dream, and the one
gleam of consolation that lighted him on the way had been the thought
that his savings might now give a help to the lad up at Lisconnel. This
had often been in his mind when he set off, shivering in the bleak
morning, and when he stopped to shift his over-heavy bundle, and when he
roused himself painfully from the bewildering lethargies that fell upon
him. But he had reckoned without the pride of the O'Beirnes.

It was a pity, too, that the affair should have led to an estrangement
between the two brothers, which set in as tacitly as a black frost, for
neither of them ever said a word to the other about Dan's intervention.
This silence left him in the thorny grip of misgivings as to the motives
with which Nicholas might be charging him. That he had done it on
purpose to spoil Nicholas's chances out of spite was one of these. And
although Dan knew very well that he had spoken from an altogether
different impulse, he was conscious of having had feelings which seemed
to give him a cruelly clear insight into the possible workings of
Nicholas's mind. "Consaitin' that it was because I was invyin' him,
that's what he's thinkin' agin me," he said to himself as the days went
by, and he perceived, or fancied, that Nicholas in his disconsolate
moping about had no other aim than to keep away from wherever Dan might
be.

But Dan's unhappiness took an acuter phase in a fortnight or so, when
Nicholas began to resume his mathematical studies. There lies just
opposite the O'Beirnes' front door a low turf bank, gently sloping, and
mostly clothed with short, fine grass, but liable to be cut into brown
squares, if sods are wanted for roofing a shed, or for spreading a green
layer of scraws under new thatch. This had been done on a rather large
scale in the past autumn, and the boys had been in the habit of
utilising the smooth, bare patches as tablets whereon to trace with
pointed sticks, or any handy implements borrowed from the forge, the
figures and diagrams occurring in Mr. Polymathers's scientific lectures.
Nicholas now, albeit he had buried both teacher and hope, began once
more to draw his circles and triangles and polygons on the soft mould,
as it grew damply and darkly through the wearing snow coverlid.
Sometimes in the excitement of demonstrating involved relations between
AB's and BC's h