At this period a Ballybay landlord, afterwards destined to figure largely in the social life of Ireland, had just come of age. Thomas McNaghten was perhaps the handsomest Irishman of his day; tall, broad-shouldered, muscular. He had a physique as splendid as that of the race of peasants from whom his father sprang; while from the gentler race of his mother he derived features of exquisite delicacy and the complexion of a lily-like pink and white. He afterwards ran a career of mad dissipation that made his name a by-word even among the reckless and debauched class to which he belonged, and died a paralytic before he was forty. But at the period of our story, he was still in the full strength and the first flush of manhood. He had cast his eyes on Betty Cunningham, and had held out to her bribes that seemed to unfold to the girl visions of untold wealth. The innate purity of the maiden had hitherto been proof against the direct influences of poverty and wretchedness and the advances of her tempter. But at last the combined intensities of hunger and despair became his allies. Three weeks after her desertion of her mother Betty Cunningham was drunk in one of the public-houses, which were frequented by the soldiers quartered in Ballybay. The fatal progress of the Irish girl who has fallen is more rapid than in any other country. Society, always cruel to its hapless victims and its outcasts, in Ireland is fanatically and barbarously savage. Betty was driven out from every house! People shuddered as she passed. She lay under hedges, her bed was often in the snow. To Ballybay she was as much an object of loathing and of horror as though she were some wild beast that men might lawfully destroy. The girl herself had no compensation for all this dread outlawry. The Traviatas of other lands are painted for us in gilded saloons, with costly wines in golden goblets, and noble lovers sighing for their smiles. But Betty, outcast, hungry, and houseless, had not one second's enjoyment of life. The faith in which she had been trained still held its grip upon her, and neither vice nor drink nor human cruelty could relax its grasp. She was a sinner against Heaven's most sacred law; and after brief life came death, and after death eternal torment. Pursued by this ever-present spectre she drank and drank, and awoke more wretched than ever, and then she drank again.