He began to read, and in five minutes' time was as deeply absorbed in his papers as if no such person as Cecil Chudleigh had existed. And yet he loved her--with that foolish and unreasoning passion called love at sight--with that love which, coming for the first time to a man of his age, comes as surely for the last. CHAPTER IX. LAURENCE O'BOYNEVILLE'S FIRST HEARING. To the dowager Mr. O'Boyneville had been very confidential. He was as frank and ingenuous as some lovesick schoolboy in his revelation of that sudden affection with which Cecil Chudleigh's pensive face had inspired him. The unconscious audacity which was one of the chief attributes of his character supported him in a position in which another man of his age and habits would have suffered an agony of self-consciousness, a torturing sense of his own foolishness. He was close upon forty years of age. His childhood had been spent on the greensward of Irish hills and valleys, among the wildest of Hibernian agriculturists; his boyhood had been passed in an Irish city, far south of the brilliant capital; his manhood had been a long, scrambling, helter-skelter journey upon one of the dustiest and most toilsome roads of modern life. His habits were not the habits of the men who were to be met in Cecil Chudleigh's world; his cleverness was not their cleverness; and those graces and accomplishments which, in their education, had been the first consideration, were just the very points which in his rough schooling had been neglected or ignored. Another man, under such circumstances--and even another Irishman--might have regarded Lady Cecil from afar with fond admiring glances, and returned to his law-library in Bloomsbury, or his dusty chambers in the Temple, not scatheless, but hopeless: and despair being a fever of but brief duration--it is your intermittent sickness of alternate hope and fear that hangs so long about the sufferer--the victim might have speedily recovered the wound inflicted by a flying Cupid's random shot. But it was not thus with Laurence O'Boyneville. He knew that he was eight-and-thirty, and that he looked five years older; nor was it long since the tailor, who made those garments which the barrister insisted should be constructed after the fashion of his youth, had sighed as he look his patron's measure, murmuring plaintively, "Another inch round the waist, Mr. O'Boyneville! and, bless my heart, it seems only yesterday when twenty-five inches was your figure!"