of Ardkill Cottage, no one knew but herself. She was then
utterly dissevered from all friends and relatives, and appeared on the
western coast of County Clare with her daughter, a perfect stranger to
every one. Father Marty was an old man, now nearly seventy, and had been
educated in France. There he had known Mrs. O'Hara's grandmother, and
hence had arisen the friendship which had induced him to bring the lady
into his parish. She came there with a daughter, then hardly more than a
child. Between two and three years had passed since her coming, and the
child was now a grown-up girl, nearly nineteen years old. Of her means
little or nothing was known accurately, even to the priest. She had told
him that she had saved enough out of the wreck on which to live with her
girl after some very humble fashion, and she paid her way. There must
have come some sudden crash, or she would hardly have taken her child
from an expensive Parisian school to vegetate in such solitude as that
she had chosen. And it was a solitude from which there seemed to be no
chance of future escape. They had brought with them a piano and a few
books, mostly French;--and with these it seemed to have been intended
that the two ladies should make their future lives endurable. Other
resources except such as the scenery of the cliffs afforded them, they
had none.

The author would wish to impress upon his readers, if it may be
possible, some idea of the outward appearance and personal character of
each of these two ladies, as his story can hardly be told successfully
unless he do so. The elder, who was at this time still under forty
years of age, would have been a very handsome woman had not troubles,
suffering, and the contests of a rugged life, in which she had both
endured and dared much, given to her face a look of hard combative
resolution which was not feminine. She was rather below than above the
average height,--or at any rate looked to be so, as she was strongly
made, with broad shoulders, and a waist that was perhaps not now as
slender as when she first met Captain O'Hara. But her hair was still
black,--as dark at least as hair can be which is not in truth black at
all but only darkly brown. Whatever might be its colour there was no
tinge of grey upon it. It was glossy, silken, and long as when she was a
girl. I do not think that she took pride in it. How could she take pride
in personal beauty, when she was never seen by any man younger than
Fath