So Mr. O'Boyneville took his wife to Ireland in the dull November weather. There are autumnal seasons in which "the rain it raineth every day" in this green isle encircled by the sea; and it seemed to Cecil as if a new deluge were about to blot fair Hibernia from the universe. It was no fitting season, nor had the barrister sufficient leisure for the ordinary pleasure-seeker's tour. The newly-wedded pair spent a few wet days in Dublin, driving in the Phœnix Park, where the autumn sunsets were very beautiful to behold in the brief intervals of the rain; and then one bleak early morning an express train bore Cecil and her husband southward to Shannonville, and under the cloudy November skies Laurence O'Boyneville once more beheld the city of his youth. He had looked forward with such a fond yearning to the day in which he should tread those familiar streets once more; and now the day had come, and the long dreamed-of pleasure was a very sad sensation after all. The glory of Shannonville had fled since the Irishman last had looked upon it, and the sight of its decay smote him to the heart. Modern civilisation and the mighty steam demon who makes naught of distance, and but little of time, had left Shannonville far behind. Commerce had no longer need of that far southern port; and where rich granaries had stored the wealth of southern Ireland, empty storehouses looked blankly on a deserted quay. There, where the vessels of many traders had jostled one another in the crowded docks, a fisherman's _Briccawn_ was slackly moored by a rotting rope. The broad streets were standing yet, but the crowd that had once made them gay had vanished. The club-house was still called a club-house; but where were the noisy revellers who had once made its walls resonant with their boisterous laughter? And the dashing young men, and the lovely blue-eyed maidens, whoso presence had rendered the chief thoroughfare of Shannonville so delightful a promenade--where were they? Gone--gone! Only pinched faces looked up at the hotel-windows where Cecil gazed sadly out upon her husband's native city. Only squalor and misery, ruin and decay, greeted Laurence O'Boyneville as he walked slowly along the deserted quays, looking for the vanished brightness of his youth. He went back to his wife sick at heart. "The place is as dreary as a city of the dead, Cecil," he said. "I have brought you to desolation and ruin, my darling. We'll leave Shannonville by the first train to-morrow morning. The sight of the old place cuts me to the heart."