Mr. O'Boyneville was rich, and was known to be rich; and on those rare occasions when he did appear in society he found himself received with extreme courtesy by some members of the gentler sex. There were mothers with unmarried daughters of five-and-thirty who would have been quite willing to cultivate Mr. O'Boyneville's acquaintance; but the Irish luminary appeared only to vanish; and the fair damsels of five-and-thirty who were so inclined to be interested in his triumphs, and so ready to talk of his last great success, had little opportunity of impressing him with their intellectual graces or charming him by their amiability. For twenty years from the day in which he had come from the banks of the Shannon to drop friendless into the wilderness of London, with only one letter of introduction and one five-pound note in his pocket, until to-day, when his name was a synonym for daring and success, he had gone scatheless. Cupid's fatal shadow rarely darkens the sombre thresholds of the Temple, nor does the god care to penetrate those courts of law where his name has so often been taken in vain by mercenary damsels seeking golden ointments for the wounds inflicted by his arrows. Pretty witnesses had stepped into the box believing their charms invincible, and had retired weeping after a verbal contest with the great O'Boyneville, as some tender fawn may fly, mauled and torn by the mighty boar of the forest. Grecian noses and timid blue eyes, blooming cheeks rendered more blooming by the coquettish adjustment of a spotted veil, might exercise a charm of potent power in other regions; but they availed nothing when Laurence O'Boyneville rose to cross-examine the witnesses of his opponent. "Put up your veil, Ma'am, and let us see your face, if you please," he said at starting. And then came the torture,--the searching tone of voice, that seemed to imply an occult knowledge; the see-sawing of trivial facts, which seemed to transform the moral standpoint of the witness into a shifting quicksand of uncertainty; the frivolous questions beside the subject, that seemed so foolish and unmeaning, till all in a moment they wove themselves into a fatal web in which the witness was inextricably entangled. In such ordeals Beauty appealed vainly to the merciless advocate; and, having derived his chief knowledge of the fair sex from witnesses in _nisi prius_, breach-of-promise, and divorce cases, it may be that Mr. O'Boyneville's estimate of womankind was scarcely an elevated one.