‘A pretty day’s work of it you have made, Master Redmond,’ said he.  ’What! you a friend to the Bradys, and knowing your uncle to be distressed for money, try and break off a match which will bring fifteen hundred a year into the family?  Quin has promised to pay off the four thousand pounds which is bothering your uncle so.  He takes a girl without a penny—­a girl with no more beauty than yonder bullock.  Well, well, don’t look furious; let’s say she is handsome—­ there’s no accounting for tastes,—­a girl that has been flinging herself at the head of every man in these parts these ten years past, and missing them all.  And you, as poor as herself, a boy of fifteen—­well, sixteen, if you insist—­and a boy who ought to be attached to your uncle as to your father’—­

‘And so I am,’ said I.

’And this is the return you make him for his kindness!  Didn’t he harbour you in his house when you were an orphan, and hasn’t he given you rent-free your fine mansion of Barryville yonder?  And now, when his affairs can be put into order, and a chance offers for his old age to be made comfortable, who flings himself in the way of him and competence?—­You, of all others; the man in the world most obliged to him.  It’s wicked, ungrateful, unnatural.  From a lad of such spirit as you are, I expect a truer courage.’

‘I am not afraid of any man alive,’ exclaimed I (for this latter part of the Captain’s argument had rather staggered me, and I wished, of course, to turn it—­as one always should when the enemy’s too strong); ’and it’s I am the injured man, Captain Fagan.  No man was ever, since the world began, treated so.  Look here—­look at this riband.  I’ve worn it in my heart for six months.  I’ve had it there all the time of the fever.  Didn’t Nora take it out of her own bosom and give it me?  Didn’t she kiss me when she gave it me, and call me her darling Redmond?’

‘She was practising,’ replied Mr. Fagan, with a sneer.  ’I know women, sir.  Give them time, and let nobody else come to the house, and they’ll fall in love with a chimney-sweep.  There was a young lady in Fermoy’—­

‘A young lady in flames,’ roared I (but I used a still hotter word).  ’Mark this; come what will of it, I swear I’ll fight the man who pretends to the hand of Nora Brady.  I’ll follow him, if it’s into the church, and meet him there.  I’ll have his blood, or he shall have mine; and this riband shall be found dyed in it.  Yes, and if I kill him, I’ll pin it on his breast, and then she may go and take back her token.’  This I said because I was very much excited at the time, and because I had not read novels and romantic plays for nothing.

‘Well,’ says Fagan after a pause, ’if it must be, it must.  For a young fellow, you are the most blood-thirsty I ever saw.  Quin’s a determined fellow, too.’

‘Will you take my message to him?’ said I, quite eagerly.

‘Hush!’ said Fagan:  ’your mother may be on the look-out.  Here we are, close to Barryville.’