Mr. O'Boyneville murmured some feeble truism in reference to the weather. In spite of his audacity--in spite of his calm assurance and unfaltering faith in ultimate victory--his ease of manner, his popular swagger, and his ready flow of language abandoned him for the moment when he found himself in the presence of that unconscious enchantress who had awakened the soul of a middle-aged barrister from its twenty years' torpor. But the paralysis called bashfulness was a very temporary affliction with Mr. O'Boyneville. Before he had been talking ten minutes to Lady Cecil, he had drawn his chair close to the piano by which she was still seated; before he had been talking to her twenty minutes, he had asked her to be his wife. She looked at him with a smile of utter incredulity. "Mr. O'Boyneville," she exclaimed, "you must surely intend this for a jest! and believe me it is a very foolish one." "A jest, Lady Cecil! What, don't you know sincerity when you meet with it? Well, I confess it was foolish of me to come to you like this, and to tell you I'd fallen over head and ears in love with you, before a fine gentleman of the modern school would presume to ask you how you are. But you see, Lady Cecil, I'm not a fine gentleman. For the first seventeen years of my life I lived amongst people almost as simple and primitive as those happy savages Columbus found in Hispaniola. For the last twenty years I have been too hard a worker in my own world to have any leisure in which to acquire the thoughts and ways of yours. I never thought that any break would come in the rapid current of my busy life, but--I suppose there is one fateful hour in every man's existence. I, who so seldom go to parties, went to Molyneux's ball; I, who so seldom talk to young ladies, talked to you; and before I turned the corner of Harley Street that night, my destiny was a settled thing. 'She has come,' said I, 'and she brings my fate in her hand.' To my mind, Lady Cecil, that which your romance-writer and your poet call love at sight--'if not an Adam at his birth, he is no love at all;' and so on--is rather an intuitive consciousness, which a man has in the hour that brings him face to face with the woman who is to be the happiness or the misery of his life. I am not going to use high-flown language, Lady Cecil. Eloquence is my stock-in-trade elsewhere. The words cannot be too plain in which I tell you that I love you. There is very little to be said in my favour. I am what people call well off; but you might reasonably expect to marry a much richer man. I come of a good old Irish family; but proscription has diminished its lands to a single farm, and the taint of treason has blotted its name. I am nearly twenty years your senior, and I have few of the accomplishments which distinguish the young men of the present day. It is the cause of the leaden casket which I am pleading, Lady Cecil; and against all the outward splendour of gold and silver which my rivals can boast, I can