"You are so good, Laurence," she said once, "and I have such a sense of protection in your presence, that I sometimes fancy you are like a new father to me. Indeed, you have more influence over me than my father had, though I loved him very, very dearly. I suppose it is because your will is so much stronger than his." Mr. O'Boyneville nodded, and pressed the little hand resting on his arm. Another man of forty engaged to a woman of twenty-two might have been slightly disconcerted by Cecil's speech; but Laurence had implicit faith in the divine right of honest love, and in his thoughts there was no shadow of fear for the future. "I must be a fool indeed if I can't teach her to love me, loving her as I do," he thought. Backwards and forwards, by loop-line and junction, by midnight express and morning mail, rushing through the chill mists and fogs of autumnal dawn, sped Mr. O'Boyneville, all through that bleak October. He took his rest in snug corners of railway carriages, and lived upon sandwiches, peppery soups, and adulterated coffee. His electioneering business went on as smoothly as his love-suit, and provincial electors yielded readily to the beguiling accents of the Hibernian candidate. But the candidate's heart was at Nasedale, and he sacrificed his parliamentary ambition to his love for Cecil. He made light of two or three hundred miles of cross-country travelling, if thereby he could obtain a quiet day with his future wife. To walk with her in the long avenue; to stand with his back to the fire, talking to her as she bent over her work; to drive her in a mail-phaeton, with a couple of merry girls in the back seat, and a pair of the most unmanageable horses in the judge's stables devouring the road before him,--these things delighted the man who had spent the best years of his life amidst the clamour of law courts, and in the dull quiet of dingy chambers. There was very little in common between himself and the woman he loved. But he had that dash of romance which the hardest friction of a practical existence cannot entirely obliterate from the composition of an Irishman; and he was really and truly in love. So one misty morning in November the bells pealed gaily from the village church, whose Norman tower loomed dark above the leafless woods of Nasedale Park; and the Nasedale servants were gay and busy. It was to be a quiet wedding. Cecil had been earnest in her entreaties that there might be no unnecessary trouble incurred by her cordial friends; but the childless Mountjoys were as pleased as if they had been arranging a daughter's marriage ceremonial.