There were two persons, however, who from the moment of her amendment felt an inward sure conviction of her convalescence.  They were Martin and Barry.  To the former this feeling was of course one of unalloyed delight.  He went over to Kelly’s Court, and spoke there of his betrothed as though she were already sitting up and eating mutton chops; was congratulated by the young ladies on his approaching nuptials, and sauntered round the Kelly’s Court shrubberies with Frank, talking over his future prospects; asking advice about this and that, and propounding the pros and cons on that difficult question, whether he would live at Dunmore, or build a house at Toneroe for himself and Anty.  With Barry, however, the feeling was very different:  he was again going to have his property wrenched from him; he was again to suffer the pangs he had endured, when first he learned the purport of his father’s will; after clutching the fruit for which he had striven, as even he himself felt, so basely, it was again to be torn from him so cruelly.

He had been horribly anxious for a termination to Anty’s sufferings; horribly impatient to feel himself possessor of the whole.  From day to day, and sometimes two or three times a day, he had seen Dr Colligan, and inquired how things were going on:  he had especially enjoined that worthy man to come up after his morning call at the inn, and get a glass of sherry at Dunmore House; and the doctor had very generally done so.  For some time Barry endeavoured to throw the veil of brotherly regard over the true source of his anxiety; but the veil was much too thin to hide what it hardly covered, and Barry, as he got intimate with the doctor, all but withdrew it altogether.  When Barry would say, “Well, doctor, how is she to-day?” and then remark, in answer to the doctor’s statement that she was very bad—­“Well, I suppose it can’t last much longer; but it’s very tedious, isn’t it, poor thing?” it was plain enough that the brother was not longing for the sister’s recovery.  And then he would go a little further, and remark that “if the poor thing was to go, it would be better for all she went at once,” and expressed an opinion that he was rather ill-treated by being kept so very long in suspense.

Doctor Colligan ought to have been shocked at this; and so he was, at first, to a certain extent, but he was not a man of a very high tone of feeling.  He had so often heard of heirs to estates longing for the death of the proprietors of them; he had so often seen relatives callous and indifferent at the loss of those who ought to have been dear to them; it seemed so natural to him that Barry should want the estate, that he gradually got accustomed to his impatient inquiries, and listened to, and answered them, without disgust.  He fell too into a kind of intimacy with Barry; he liked his daily glass, or three or four glasses, of sherry; and besides, it was a good thing for him to stand well in a professional point of view with a man who had the best house in the village, and who would soon have eight hundred a-year.