Zoe had been unfortunate from her birth. Her mother having accompanied the old duke upon an embassy to Constantinople, had happened to please the fancy of the reigning Emperor so forcibly, that, contrary to the advice of his counsellors, he had married her. Disproportioned marriages, however, are seldom happy ones: and that of the parents of Zoe formed no exception to the general rule. The Emperor soon repented his rashness, and, becoming tired of his wife, treated her with coldness and neglect; whilst she, far removed from all her former friends, and finding herself despised by the man for whose sake she had sacrificed every thing, lingered a few years and then died unheeded and forlorn, leaving only the hapless Zoe to lament her fate. The Emperor married again; and Zoe had dragged on a miserable existence, till in an insurrection of the Greeks, her father had been murdered, and she herself compelled to fly from Constantinople. She had repaired first to Africa; but finding her grandfather was in Spain, she had followed him thither, and still remained with him, under the protection of Roderick. It was, indeed, the aristocracy of Spain for which the Irish hero was now principally fighting; for they had suffered most severely from the licentious conduct of the soldiers, and were most earnest in imploring his assistance. When the seat of the Spanish monarchy had been removed to Africa, most of the nobles had followed in its train, whilst those that remained had become objects of hate and suspicion to the republican governments that ensued. Still, however, the _amor patriæ_ glowed strongly in their breasts, and chained them to their country; they submitted patiently to innumerable grievances, till, a few months before they applied to Roderick, finding the insolence of the soldiers become insupportable, they determined to throw off the yoke, and re-establish a monarchy in Spain. For this purpose, they had invited Don Pedro, a younger branch of their former Royal family to come over from Africa to accept their throne. He complied, and had brought in his train many of the old nobility; and amongst the rest the venerable Duke of Medina Celina, whose most passionate wish it was, that he might die and be entombed in Spain. Don Pedro had been unsuccessful, and had fled; but many of those who had accompanied him remained, and with the resident Spanish nobility now formed the splendid Court of Roderick at Cadiz.