Accomplished as the dairyman was, he might have made a mess of any other name; but the great barrister's appellation was "familiar in his ear as household words;" and he had many "household words" with his better half when the propensity for strong drinks, contracted in the riotous days of his butlerhood, beguiled him from the domestic shelter. He knew Mr. O'Boyneville, and had sat on juries in the courts where that gentleman was mighty, and had been cajoled by the Irishman's insidious eloquence and slap-dash mode of argument. He had laughed over Mr. O'Boyneville's speeches and cross-examinations recorded in the newspapers; and he ushered the barrister into the little drawing-room in Dorset Square with all the respect due to so brilliant a luminary. Cecil was very much annoyed by the Irishman's early arrival; but he was her aunt's guest, and she was bound to receive him courteously. She laid aside her book, and made the barrister a curtsy. And the brilliant O'Boyneville--the man with whom cool impudence often rose to the level of genius--that luminary before whom the lesser lights of the bar waxed faint and pale, how did his familiarity with feminine psychology, as exhibited in the witness box, serve him in the dowager's drawing-room? Alas for Hibernian wit and Hibernian audacity! for Mr. O'Boyneville could think of no more interesting subject of remark at this moment than the fact that the day had been warm: and a warm day in the last week of June is not exactly a notable phenomenon. Lady Cecil agreed to the barrister's statement with regard to the weather, and then went on to say that town was not so full as it had been: and this is again not exactly a phenomenon in the last week of June. "I don't know about that, Lady Cecil," replied Mr. O'Boyneville. "If you'd been in the Court of Common Pleas this morning you'd not have thought London empty." And then there was a pause; for the barrister, being more accustomed to browbeat and terrify the fair sex than to make small-talk for their amusement, found himself brought to a standstill; and Cecil did not like her aunt's guest well enough to make any desperate conversational plunge. He sat looking at her in silence; not with the bold stare of admiration with which he was wont to take a feminine witness off her guard before entrapping her into prevarication or perjury, but with a more earnest gaze than he had ever fixed on any woman's face before. "She reminds me of my mother," he thought; "and yet it's only a pale shadow I can remember when I think of my mother. I was such a child when she died."