It was in no way strange, therefore, that the young lady who had given a good deal of attention to hare-brained young ensigns and penniless young curates with nothing better than remote expectations, should consider Mr. Tredethlyn worthy of her most serious deliberation. The present, however, was no time for thought,--for were not the young man’s eyes perpetually wandering towards the slender figure under the light of the moderator lamp? Miss Desmond felt there was no time to be lost. Already the rich man had made his election--already he had enrolled himself in the list of Maude Hillary’s victims. Another woman, perceiving the state of affairs, might have resigned herself to the loss of this grand chance of winning a rich husband; but Julia’s courage was not so easily dashed. It rose, rather, with the thought of contest. Had not her father been a grand old freebooter, boasting of kingly blood in his battered old body, and spilling it under the colours of every rebel army in modern Europe? The Desmond spirit rose in Julia’s breast as she saw Francis Tredethlyn’s wandering glances, half sheepish, half unconscious. “I can set myself against her this time,” she thought; “and the battle between us will be a fair one. _This_ man cannot be a fortune-hunter. We meet on tolerably equal terms for once in a way, Miss Hillary, and let us see who will win.” Julia’s dark eyes flashed their brightest as she looked across all the width of the room to the radiant-looking girl at the piano; and then she turned them suddenly upon Francis Tredethlyn, and began to talk to him. She began to talk to him, and, more than this, she made him listen to her. Miss Desmond was a brilliant talker. She possessed that wondrous faculty vulgarly called the gift of the gab,--the power of talking about everything and anything, or even about nothing, for the matter of that; the power of enchaining a listener in spite of himself, holding him prisoner when he had rather be away, and yet not detaining him an altogether unwilling prisoner;--the power of talking ignorantly, without seeming to be ignorant; speculating ideas and allusions at a venture, and never betraying the shallowness of their nature; assuming an interest in the most uninteresting subject, and never revealing the hollowness of the assumption,--a power, in short, which in its fascination seems like a modern form of those classic philtres which Roman maidens were wont to administer to eligible bachelors in the days when Rome was young. It may be said that Miss Desmond owed this faculty in some degree to her Hibernian ancestry; but no suspicion of their native accent vulgarized her discourse. Only a softer and richer depth in her low voice betrayed her Celtic origin.