, which Roland's devotion to the lady at his side
more than once interrupted.

The most disconsolate and woe-begone of all was the poor peer, who,
propped up by cushions, sat with unmeaning gaze steadily riveted on the
fire. There was something so horribly absurd, too, in the costume in
which he was clad, that converted all pity into a sense of ridicule.
A great wide pea-jacket encircled his shrunken, wasted figure to the
knees, where the thin attenuated legs appeared, clad in blue worsted
stockings, whose wide folds fell in a hundred wrinkles around them; a
woollen cap of red and orange stripes covered his head, giving a most
grotesque expression to the small and fine-cut features of his face.
If Lady Kilgoff and Cashel had not been too much interested on other
topics, they could not have failed to discover, in the occasional
stealthy glances that Sickleton cast on the old lord, that the costume
had been a thing of his own devising, and that the rakish air of the
nightcap, set sideways on the head, was owing to the sailor's inveterate
fondness for a joke, no matter how ill-timed the moment or ill-suited
the subject of it.

Behind them, and in a wider circle, sat the fisherman and his family,
the occasional flash of the fire lighting up the gloom where they
sat, and showing, as in a Rembrandt, the strong and vigorous lines of
features where health and hardship were united--the whole forming in the
light and shadow a perfect subject for a painter.

From the first moment of the mishap, Lord Kilgoff had sunk into a state
of almost child-like imbecility, neither remembering where he was, nor
taking interest in anything, an occasional fractious or impatient remark
at some parsing inconvenience being all the evidence he gave of
thought. It devolved, therefore, upon Cashel to make every arrangement
necessary,--an assumption on his part which his natural respect and
delicacy made no small difficulty. As for Lady Kilgoff, she appeared
implicitly to yield to his judgment on every point; and when Roland
suggested that, instead of returning to Dublin and all its inevitable
rumors, they should at once proceed to Tubbermore, she assented at once,
and most willingly.

It was with this object, then, that Sickleton sat, pen in hand, making
notes of Cashel's directions, and from time to time writing at his
dictation to various tradesmen whose services he stood in need of.
It would certainly have called for a clearer head, and a calme