e appreciated the
flood of melody. As it was, so completely was he carried away by his
emotions that in a rapture of admiration and delight he threw himself on
his knees, and, seizing her hand, covered it with kisses.

"You're an angel; you're the loveliest, sweetest, and most enchanting
crayture--" He had got thus far in his rhapsody when my father entered
the room, and, throwing himself into a chair, laughed till the tears ran
down his cheeks.

"Bob! Bob!" cried he, "is this quite fair, I say?" And the old man, at
once alive to the bantering and ridicule to which his adventure would
expose him, got slowly up and resumed his seat, with a most ludicrous
expression of shame on his features.

"There is no necessity of introducing one of my oldest friends to
you, Josephine," said my father. "He has already done so without my
intervention, and, I must say, he seems to have lost no time in pushing
the acquaintance."

"He is quite charming," said my mother. "We had an old Marquis de
Villebois so like him, and he was the delight of our neighborhood in
Provence."

"I see what it is now," muttered Ffrench, "you are cutting me up,
between you; but I deserve it well. I was an old fool,--I am ashamed of
myself."

"Are you going away?" cried my mother.

"What is she saying?" asked he.

"She asks if you have really the heart to leave her," rejoined my
father, laughing.

"Begad, you may laugh now, Watty," replied he, in a half-angry tone;
"but I tell you what it is, you'd neither be so ready with your fun,
nor so willing to play interpreter, if old Bob was the same man he
was five-and-thirty years ago!--No, ma'am, he would not," added he,
addressing my mother. "But maybe, after all, it's a greater triumph for
you to turn an old head than a young one."

He hurried away after this; and although my father followed him, and
did all in his power to make him join his companions at table, it was
in vain; he insisted on going to his room, probably too full of the
pleasant vision he had witnessed to destroy the illusion by the noisy
merriment of a drinking-party.

Trivial as the event was in itself, it was not without its
consequences. Bob Ffrench had spread the fame of my mother's beauty
and accomplishments over Dublin before the following week closed, and
nothing else was talked of in the society of the capital. My father,
seeing that all further reserve on his part was out of the question,
and being satisfied besides that my