iencies. At home, too, the sorrow and the pride of
his life were always before him--his son, a weak and dissipated boy; and
his daughter, who had inherited his vigor and his spirit with a beauty
that had descended to her from some forgotten peasant girl of the Irish
bogs.

Faraday, with his power of listening interminably, and his intelligent
comments, was a favorite of old Ryan's. He greeted him with a growling
welcome; and then, civilities being interchanged, called to the
Chinaman for another glass. This menial, rubbing off the long mirrors
that decorated the walls, would not obey the mandate till it had been
roared at him by the wounded lion in a tone which made the chandelier
rattle.

"I never can make those infernal idiots understand me," said old Ryan,
plaintively. "They won't do a thing I tell them. It takes the old lady
to manage 'em. She makes them skip."

Then after some minutes of discourse on more or less uninteresting
matters, the weary old man, glad of a listener, launched forth into
domestic topics.

"Gen and the old lady are out buying new togs. I got a letter here
that'll astonish them when they get back. It's from that English cuss,
Courtney. D'ye ever hear about him? He was hanging about Genevieve all
last winter. And this letter says he's coming back, that his
grandfather's dead, and he's a lord now, and he's coming back. Do you
mind that now, Faraday?" he said, looking with eyes full of humor at the
young man.

Faraday expressed a sharp surprise.

"You know, Jack," continued the old man, "we're trained up to having
these high-priced Englishmen come out here and eat our dinners, and
sleep in our spare rooms, and drink our wines and go home, and when they
meet us there forget they've ever seen us before; but we ain't trained
up to havin' 'em come back this way, and it's hard to get accustomed to
it."

"It's not surprising," said Faraday, coldly.

"I'm not so dead sure of that. But I can tell you the old lady'll be
wild about this."

"Does Mrs. Ryan like him so much?" said the visitor, still coldly.

"All women like a lord, and Mrs. Ryan ain't different from the rest of
her sex. She's dead stuck on Gen marrying him. I'm not myself, Jack. I'm
no Anglomaniac; an American's good enough for me. I'm not spoiling to
see my money going to patch up the roof of the ancestral castle of the
Courtneys, or pay their ancestral debts--not by a long chalk."

"Do you think he's coming back to borrow mon