ong many. Her hair was
already long and rich, but was light in colour, much lighter than
it grew to be when some four or five more years had passed over her
head. At the time of which I speak she wore it in simple braids
brushed back from her forehead, not having as yet learned that
majestic mode of sweeping it from her face which has in subsequent
years so generally prevailed.

And what then of her virtues and her faults--of her merits and
defects? Will it not be better to leave them all to time and the
coming pages? That she was proud of her birth, proud of being an
Irish Desmond, proud even of her poverty, so much I may say of her,
even at that early age. In that she was careless of the world's
esteem, fond to a fault of romance, poetic in her temperament, and
tender in her heart, she shared the ordinary--shall I say foibles or
virtues?--of so many of her sex. She was passionately fond of her
brother, but not nearly equally so of her mother, of whom the brother
was too evidently the favoured child.

She had lived much alone; alone, that is, with her governess and
with servants at Desmond Court. Not that she had been neglected by
her mother, but she had hardly found herself to be her mother's
companion; and other companions there she had had none. When she was
sixteen her governess was still with her; but a year later than that
she was left quite alone, except inasmuch as she was with her mother.

She was sixteen when she first began to ask questions of Owen
Fitzgerald's face with those large eyes of hers; and she saw much
of him, and he of her, for the twelve months immediately after that.
Much of him, that is, as much goes in this country of ours, where
four or five interviews in as many months between friends is supposed
to signify that they are often together. But this much-seeing
occurred chiefly during the young earl's holidays. Now and again
he did ride over in the long intervals, and when he did do so was
not frowned upon by the countess; and so, at the end of the winter
holidays subsequent to that former winter in which the earl had had
his tumble, people through the county began to say that he and the
countess were about to become man and wife.

It was just then that people in the county were also beginning to
talk of the Hap House orgies; and the double scandal reached Owen's
ears, one shortly after the other. That orgies scandal did not
hurt him much. It is, alas! too true that consciousness of such a