“If you knew, Mary, how often I think about you.”  Then Mary, who was very happy at hearing such words, and who was walking in to dinner with him at the moment, could not refrain herself from pressing his arm with her little fingers.  She knew that Phineas in his position could not marry at once; but she would wait for him,—­oh, for ever, if he would only ask her.  He of course was a wicked traitor to tell her that he was wont to think of her.  But Jove smiles at lovers’ perjuries;—­and it is well that he should do so, as such perjuries can hardly be avoided altogether in the difficult circumstances of a successful gentleman’s life.  Phineas was a traitor, of course, but he was almost forced to be a traitor, by the simple fact that Lady Laura Standish was in London, and Mary Flood Jones in Killaloe.

He remained for nearly five months at Killaloe, and I doubt whether his time was altogether well spent.  Some of the books recommended to him by Mr. Monk he probably did read, and was often to be found encompassed by blue books.  I fear that there was a grain of pretence about his blue books and parliamentary papers, and that in these days he was, in a gentle way, something of an impostor.  “You must not be angry with me for not going to you,” he said once to Mary’s mother when he had declined an invitation to drink tea; “but the fact is that my time is not my own.”  “Pray don’t make any apologies.  We are quite aware that we have very little to offer,” said Mrs. Flood Jones, who was not altogether happy about Mary, and who perhaps knew more about members of Parliament and blue books than Phineas Finn had supposed.  “Mary, you are a fool to think of that man,” the mother said to her daughter the next morning.  “I don’t think of him, mamma; not particularly.”  “He is no better than anybody else that I can see, and he is beginning to give himself airs,” said Mrs. Flood Jones.  Mary made no answer; but she went up into her room and swore before a figure of the Virgin that she would be true to Phineas for ever and ever, in spite of her mother, in spite of all the world,—­in spite, should it be necessary, even of himself.

About Christmas time there came a discussion between Phineas and his father about money.  “I hope you find you get on pretty well,” said the doctor, who thought that he had been liberal.

“It’s a tight fit,” said Phineas,—­who was less afraid of his father than he had been when he last discussed these things.

“I had hoped it would have been ample,” said the doctor.

“Don’t think for a moment, sir, that I am complaining,” said Phineas.  “I know it is much more than I have a right to expect.”

The doctor began to make an inquiry within his own breast as to whether his son had a right to expect anything;—­whether the time had not come in which his son should be earning his own bread.  “I suppose,” he said, after a pause, “there is no chance of your doing anything at the bar now?”