Julia was a very dignified young lady, and had been highly educated in a Parisian convent, whence she had returned to the south of Ireland to find the impress of decay upon every object around her, from the grass-grown roofs of the cottages in the lane below the castle-boundary to the shattered figure of the brave old colonel. She returned in time to attend her father’s death-bed, to which Lionel Hillary, his oldest friend and largest creditor, was summoned by an imploring letter from the old colonel. To Mr. Hillary the old man confided his penniless daughter. He had nothing to leave her but a set of old-fashioned garnet ornaments which had belonged to her mother, and to which he fondly alluded as the “fam’ly jools;” he had nothing to leave her except this antique trumpery and his blessing; but he confided her to his largest creditor, having a vague impression that the largeness of the debt and the heavy interest he _would_ have given upon all the money lent him by his friend, had he ever lived to return the principal, laid Mr. Hillary under a kind of obligation to him. However it was, the London merchant promised to be a friend and protector to Julia Desmond; and as soon as the colonel’s funeral was over carried her back to London with him, and established her in his own house, as the companion of his daughter. A young lady more or less was of little consequence in such an establishment as the Cedars; so the merchant thought very lightly of what he did for Miss Desmond, and Maude Hillary was delighted to have a friend who was to be her perpetual companion; a friend who could sing a good second to any duet, and was never out of time in “Blow, gentle gales,” whensoever a masculine visitor with a good bass organ was to be procured for the third in that delicious glee. The two girls drove together, and walked together, and rode together, and played duets on one piano and on two pianos, or a harp and piano; and went out together to make water-colour sketches of their favourite bends in the river, with very blue water and very green willows, and a man in a scarlet jacket lazily pushing a ferry-boat away from the shore, and a Newfoundland dog, very black and white and spotty, lying on the bank.