Mr. Martin himself was no unworthy “pendant” to this portrait. He was tall and stately, with a lofty forehead, and temples finely and well fashioned; while full, deep-set blue eyes of the very sternest determination, and a mouth, every line of which betrayed firmness, gave the character to a face that also could expand into the most genial good-fellowship, and become at times the symbol of a pleasant and convivial Irish gentleman. In his youth he had been a beau of the Court of Versailles. Scandal had even coupled his name with that of Marie Antoinette; and more truthful narratives connected him with some of the most extravagant adventures of that profligate and brilliant period. After a career of the wildest dissipation and excess, he had married, late in life, the daughter of the Earl of Exmere, one of the proudest and poorest names in the British Peerage. Two or three attempts to shine in the world of London,--not as successful as they were expected to have proved,--an effort at ascendancy in Irish political life, also a failure, coupled with disappointment on the score of an only brother, who had married beneath him, and was reputed to have “lost himself,” seemed to have disgusted Godfrey Martin with the world, and he had retired to his lonely mansion in the west, which now for eighteen years he had scarcely quitted for a single day. His only son had joined a cavalry regiment in India a few years before the period our story opens, and which, I may now state, dates for about four or five and twenty years back; but his family included a niece, the only child of his brother, and whose mother had died in giving her birth. Between Mr. Martin and Lady Dorothea, as they sat at breakfast, little conversation passed. He occupied himself with the newly arrived newspapers, and she perused a mass of letters which had just come by that morning's post; certain scraps of the intelligence gleaned from either of these sources forming the only subjects of conversation between them. “So they have resolved to have a new Parliament. I knew it would come to that; I always said so; and, as usual, the dissolution finds us unprepared.” “Plantagenet's regiment is ordered to Currachee, wherever that may be,” said Lady Dorothea, languidly. “Call him Harry, and we shall save ourselves some trouble in discussing him,” replied he, pettishly. “At all events, he cannot possibly be here in time for the contest; and we must, I suppose, give our support to Kilmorris again.” “Do you mean, after his conduct about the harbor, and the shameful way he sneaked out of the Port Martin project?” “Find anything better, madam; there is the difficulty. Kilmorris is a gentleman, and no Radical; and, as times go, these are rather rare qualities.” “Lady Sarah Upton's match is off,” said Lady Dorothea, reading from a note beside her. “Sir Joseph insisted upon the uncontrolled possession of all her Staffordshire property.” “And perfectly right.”