How, or where, Beau Power's daughter lived during the next twelve years must always remain largely a mystery. At one time she appears in Dublin; at another, in Cahir; but mostly she seems to have spent her time in England. Over this part of her adventurous life a curtain is drawn; though some have endeavoured to raise it, and have professed to discover scandalous doings for which there seems to be no vestige of authority. We know that, by the time she was twenty, Sir Thomas Lawrence was so struck by her beauty that he immortalised it on canvas; but it is only in 1816 that the curtain is actually raised, and we find her living with her brother in London, where, to quote her sister, "she received at her house only those whose age and character rendered them safe friends, and a very few others, on whose perfect respect and consideration she could wholly rely. Among the latter was the Earl of Blessington, then a widower." Whatever may have been her life during this obscure period, when her charms were maturing into such exquisite beauty, it is thus certain that at its close she was moving in a good circle, and was as irreproachable as she was lovely. Of her rascally husband she had happily seen nothing during all those years of more or less lonely adventure; and the end of this tragic union was now near. One day in October 1817, the Captain ended his misspent days in tragedy. He had drifted through dissipation and crime to the King's Bench prison; and in a fit of frenzy--or, as some say, in a drunken quarrel--had flung himself to his death through a window of his gaol. Thus, at last, the nightmare that had clouded the young life of the squireen's daughter was over, and she was free to plan her future as she would. What this future was to be was soon placed beyond doubt. The widowed Earl of Blessington had long been among the most ardent admirers of the lovely Irishwoman; and before Farmer had been many months in his prison-grave, he had won her consent to be his Countess. The "ugly duckling" had reached a coronet through such trials and vicissitudes as happily seldom fall to the lot of woman; and her future was to be as radiant as her past had been ignoble and obscure. Seldom has a woman cradled in comparative poverty made such a splendid alliance. Lord Blessington was a veritable Croesus among Irish landlords, with a rent-roll of £30,000 a year; allied, it is true, to an extravagance more than commensurate with his revenue. He had a passion for all things theatrical, and an almost barbaric taste in the gorgeous furnishings with which he loved to surround himself; and this taste his wife seems to have shared.