The world, indeed, is too much in the habit of drawing distorted inferences from the transient feuds that occasionally appear in domestic life.  It would be hard to find a family in which they do not sometimes occur; and when noticed by strangers, it is both uncharitable and unjust to conclude that there is an absence of domestic affection in the hearts of those who, after all, prove no more than that they are subject to the errors and passions of human nature, like their fellow creatures.  No sister, for instance, ever loved another with stronger affection than poor Maura did her brother Felix, notwithstanding the repeated scoldings which, for very trivial causes, he experienced at her tongue.  Woe, keen and scathing, be to those who dared, in her presence to utter an insinuation against him.

“If she abused him, she only did it for his good, and because she loved him; an’ good right she had to love him, for a better brother never breathed the breath of life.  Wasn’t he a mere boy, only one-and-twenty years come next Lammas; and surely it stood to reason that he wanted sometimes to be checked and scolded too.  He had neither father or mother to guide him, poor boy; and who would guide him, and advise him too, if his own sister wouldn’t do it?  Only one-and-twenty, and six feet in his shoes; but no punhial, no cabbage upon two pot-sticks, like some she knew, that were ready enough to give boy a harsh word when they ought to look nearer home, and—­may-be—­but she said nothing—­as God forbid that she’d make or meddle with any neighbor’s character; but still, may-be, they’d find enough to blame at home, if they’d open their eyes to their own failings, as well as they do to the failings of their neighbors.”

Another circumstance also strongly characteristic of the woman’s heart, was evinced in the high and vigorous tone she assumed towards Hugh, whenever, in any of his dark moods, he happened to take Felix to task.  These fierce encounters, however, never occurred in Felix’s presence; for she thought that to take his part then, would remove, in a great degree, the ’vantage ground on which she stood with reference to himself.  Difficult, indeed, was the part she found herself compelled to play on those delicate occasions.  She could not, as a moralist and disciplinarian, proverbially strict, seem in any degree to countenance the charges brought by Hugh against Felix; nor, on the other hand, was it without a command of temper and heroic self-denial, rarely attained, that she was able to keep, her indignation against Hugh pent up within decorous and plausible limits.  During the remonstrance of the latter, she usually pushed the charges against Felix into the notorious failings of Hugh himself, and this she did in a tone of irony so dry and cutting, that Hugh was almost in every case, as willing to abandon the attack as he had been to begin it.