The man who had been a private soldier only a few months before that day, and who had not yet been able to realize the change made in his position by the inheritance of thirty thousand a year, found himself oppressed by a strange feeling as he sat in Miss Hillary’s open carriage with his back to the horses, surrounded by billows of silk and lace and muslin, a surging sea of feminine draperies, from which a faint perfume was wafted towards him as the summer wind blew in his face. It was not so much that he was ill at ease in that feminine presence, or in any way daunted by the fire of two pairs of handsome eyes. The feeling which oppressed him was rather a sense of unreality. He was like a child at a pantomime, who sees a stage-fairy for the first time, and cannot believe that the resplendent creature is only flesh and blood. He looked at Maude Hillary, and thought of his cousin Susan’s rosy cheeks and brown hair shaded by the familiar dimity sun-bonnet. There were men in the world who might aspire to marry such a creature as this Miss Hillary. He tried to imagine the sort of man who might lift his eyes to that divinity; and there arose in his mind the picture of a grandiose creature with yellow whiskers and a geranium in his button-hole. The æsthetic element in Mr. Tredethlyn’s mind was as yet very imperfectly developed; and his idea of a lover befitting Maude Hillary leaned rather to the gaudy king’s-pattern order of mankind. The Australian merchant sat with his head leaning back against the cushions of the carriage and his eyes closed. His headache was, if anything, worse, he confessed, in answer to Maude’s anxious inquiries. He did not speak three times during the homeward drive, and his daughter rarely took her eyes from his face. She was very fond of him, and displayed her affection for him now as frankly as she had done when she had been a little girl in a white frock, sitting on his knee after dinner, and eating unwholesome fruits and confections out of his plate. She watched him now with a tender anxiety in her face, and seemed almost unconscious of the presence of the big soldier-like individual with a bronzed countenance and close-cropped black hair. But Francis Tredethlyn was not entirely neglected, for Miss Desmond appeared determined to atone for Maude’s want of courtesy. She had heard the Cornishman’s story from Mr. Somerset, who had heard it from a gentleman whom he described as “a fellow in the 11th Hussars;” and the handsome Julia felt some little interest in the hero of the narrative. An ignorant young man, a farmer’s son, who has suddenly come into a fortune of thirty thousand a year, is not the sort of person to be met with every day. Julia remembered that dreary ruin, that tall stone gaol on the bare hill beyond Limerick, which sounded so well when casually alluded to as Castle Desmond; but whose image chilled her as it rose, dismal and stony, before her mind’s eye. She remembered the muddy roads, the