It needed but little to start Major Talbot-Lowry again on the topic that had occupied him unceasingly since Christian’s return that morning.  Beginning with the burning of the Derrylugga gorse covert, and moving on through threatening letters, and rents deliberately withheld, he lashed himself into one of the quick furies that Larry remembered well.  What Larry was less prepared for than was his friend, Dr. Mangan, was the sudden turn that the storm took in his direction.

“The blackguards think they can frighten me into selling on their own terms!” shouted Dick, “and that damned priest of theirs—­I beg your pardon, Mangan, but the fellow doesn’t behave like a clergyman, and it’s impossible to think of him as one—­is backing them up, and I may say”—­here it was that the heart of the storm was revealed—­“I may say that I’m very little obliged to your son, or to his principal here, for the part they have played in the affair!  That was the beginning of the whole thing!” He turned fiercely upon Larry, his tenor voice pitched on a higher key.  “How could I, with my property loaded with charges, that were no fault of mine, sell at the price you could afford to take?  Look at the price that fellow—­what’s his damned name?—­Brady, got for his farm, for the tenant-right alone, mind you!  Forty years’ purchase!  And I’m offered seventeen for the fee simple!”

Dick was standing up on the hearthrug, towering over the Doctor and Larry in their low chairs.  Larry noticed how thin he had become, and how the well-cut grey clothes, that he always wore, hung loosely on his shrunken figure.  “You’re a young fellow now, Larry; wait till you’ve been for thirty years doing your best for your property and your country, and getting no thanks!  Thanks!” Dick gave a brief and furious laugh.  “I’ve kept the hounds for them.  I’ve slaved on the Bench and on Grand Juries.  I’ve got them roads and railways, and God knows what else—­whatever they wanted—­I’ve sat at the Board of Guardians, and done my best to keep down the rates, till they kicked me out to make room for men who would sell their souls for a sixpence, and made their living out of bribes!”

“Oh, come, come, Major, it’s not so bad as all that!” said the Big Doctor, soothingly, as Dick stopped, panting for breath.  “Don’t mind it now!”

“But I must mind it!” shouted Dick.  “When I think of how I’ve been treated, and plenty more like me, loyal men who run straight and do their best, I declare to God I feel I don’t know which I hate worst, the English Government, that pitches its friends overboard to save its own skin, or my own countrymen, that don’t know the meaning of the word gratitude!”

He turned again upon Larry:  “And upon my word and honour, Larry, I didn’t think that your father’s son would have been tarred with that brush, anyhow!”

“Now, Major,” broke in Dr. Mangan, again, “you know we agreed that there was no use in attaching too much importance to that transaction.  Barty and Larry here were in a very difficult position, and even though you and I might not have approved entirely of their action—­”