With the utmost magnanimity, Hervey, although he saw a successful rival for Belinda’s hand in Augustus Vincent, rescued him from ruin at the gaming-table, and induced him to promise never to gamble again.

“I was determined Belinda’s husband should be my friend.  I have succeeded beyond my hopes,” he said.

But Vincent’s love of play had decided Belinda at last.  She refused him finally in a letter which she confessed she found difficult to write, but which she sent because she had promised she would not hold him in suspense once she had made her decision.

After this Virginia Hartley confessed to her attachment for one Captain Sunderland, and Clarence was free to avow his passion for Belinda.

“And what is Miss Portman to believe,” cried one of Belinda’s friends, “when she has seen you on the very eve of marriage with another lady?”

“The strongest merit I can plead with such a woman as Miss Portman,” he replied, “is that I was ready to sacrifice my own happiness to a sense of duty.”

* * * * *

Castle Rackrent

“Castle Rackrent” was published anonymously in 1800.  It was not only the first of Miss Edgeworth’s novels,—­it is in many respects her best work.  Later came “The Absentee,” “Belinda,” “Helen,” the “Tales of Fashionable Life,” and the “Moral Tales.”  Sir Walter Scott wrote that reading these stories of Irish peasant life made him feel “that something might be tempted for my own country of the same kind as that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland,” something that would procure for his own countrymen “sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles.”  As a study of Irish fidelity in the person of Old Thady, the steward who tells the story of “Castle Rackrent,” the book is a masterpiece.

I.—­Sir Patrick and Sir Murtagh

Having, out of friendship for the family, undertaken to publish the memoirs of the Rackrent family, I think it my duty to say a few words concerning myself first.  My real name is Thady Quirk, though in the family I’ve always been known as “Honest Thady”; afterwards, I remember to hear them calling me “Old Thady,” and now I’ve come to “Poor Thady.”  To look at me you would hardly think poor Thady was the father of Attorney Quirk; he is a high gentleman, and having better than fifteen hundred a year, landed estate, looks down upon honest Thady.  But I wash my hands of his doings, and as I lived so will I die, true and loyal to the family.

I ought to bless that day when Sir Tallyhoo Rackrent lost a fine hunter and his life, all in one day’s hunt, for the estate came straight into the family, upon one condition, that Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin (whose driver my grandfather was) should, by Act of Parliament, take the surname and arms of Rackrent.

Now it was the world could see what was in Sir Patrick.  He gave the finest entertainments ever was heard of in the country; not a man could stand after supper but Sir Patrick himself.  He had his house, from one year’s end to another, as full of company as it would hold; and this went on, I can’t tell you how long.