om of Blessington seemed likely to become extinct. The death
of his wife, however, gave the earl a special opportunity to display
his extravagant tastes. He spent more than four thousand pounds on the
funeral ceremonies, importing from France a huge black velvet
catafalque which had shortly before been used at the public funeral of
Napoleon's marshal, Duroc, while the house blazed with enormous wax
tapers and glittered with cloth of gold.

Lord Blessington soon plunged again into the busy life of London.
Having now no heir, there was no restraint on his expenditures, and he
borrowed large sums of money in order to buy additional estates and
houses and to experience the exquisite joy of spending lavishly. At
this time he had his lands in Ireland, a town house in St. James's
Square, another in Seymour Place, and still another which was afterward
to become famous as Gore House, in Kensington.

Some years before he had met in Ireland a lady called Mrs. Maurice
Farmer; and it happened that she now came to London. The earlier story
of her still young life must here be told, because her name afterward
became famous, and because the tale illustrates wonderfully well the
raw, crude, lawless period of the Regency, when England was fighting
her long war with Napoleon, when the Prince Regent was imitating all
the vices of the old French kings, when prize-fighting, deep drinking,
dueling, and dicing were practised without restraint in all the large
cities and towns of the United Kingdom. It was, as Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle has said, "an age of folly and of heroism"; for, while it
produced some of the greatest black-guards known to history, it
produced also such men as Wellington and Nelson, the two Pitts,
Sheridan, Byron, Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott.

Mrs. Maurice Farmer was the daughter of a small Irish landowner named
Robert Power--himself the incarnation of all the vices of the time.
There was little law in Ireland, not even that which comes from public
opinion; and Robert Power rode hard to hounds, gambled recklessly, and
assembled in his house all sorts of reprobates, with whom he held
frightful orgies that lasted from sunset until dawn. His wife and his
young daughters viewed him with terror, and the life they led was a
perpetual nightmare because of the bestial carousings in which their
father engaged, wasting his money and mortgaging his estates until the
end of his wild career was in plain sight.

There happened to be s