ble and accomplished, but because the elder
found in him an invincible taste for men and women, their fortunes,
oddities, catastrophes--especially the latter--similar to his own.

Like Mary Lyster, both were good gossips; but of a much more
disinterested type than she. Women indeed as gossips are too apt to
pursue either the damnation of some one else or the apotheosis of
themselves. But here the stupider no less than the abler man showed a
certain broad detachment not very common in women--amused by the human
comedy itself, making no profit out of it, either for themselves or
morals, but asking only that the play should go on.

The incident, or rather the heroine of the evening, had given Lord
Grosville a topic which in the case of William Ashe he saw no reason for
avoiding; and in the peace of the smoking-room, when he was no longer
either hungry for his dinner or worried by his responsibilities as host,
he fell upon his wife's family, and, as though he had been the manager
of a puppet-show, unpacked the whole box of them for Ashe's
entertainment.

Figure after figure emerged, one more besmirched than another, till
finally the most beflecked of all was shaken out and displayed--Lady
Grosville's brother and Kitty's father, the late Lord Blackwater. And on
this occasion Ashe did not try to escape the story which was thus a
second time brought across him. Lord Grosville, if he pleased, had a
right to tell it, and there was now a curious feeling in Ashe's mind
which had been entirely absent before, that he had, in some sort, a
right to hear it.

Briefly, the outlines of it fell into something like this shape: Henry,
fifth Earl of Blackwater, had begun life as an Irish peer, with more
money than the majority of his class; an initial advantage soon undone
by an insane and unscrupulous extravagance. He was, however, a fine,
handsome, voracious gentleman, born to prey upon his kind, and when he
looked for an heiress he was not long in finding her. His first wife, a
very rich woman, bore him one daughter. Before the daughter was three
years old, Lord Blackwater had developed a sturdy hatred of the mother,
chiefly because she failed to present him with a son; and he could not
even appease himself by the free spending of her money, which, so far as
the capital was concerned, was sharply looked after by a pair of
trustees, Belfast manufacturers and Presbyterians, to whom the
Blackwater type was not at all congenial.

These