."

"Oh, of course. And now doesn't she love a convert and hate a
Puseyite?"

"All Irish clergyman's daughters do that."

"Well, Fanny, you can't say but that it was a good portrait; and after
that, will you pretend to say you call Miss O'Joscelyn your friend?"

"Not my very friend of friends; but, as friends go, she's as good as
most others."

"And who is the friend of friends, Fanny?"

"Come, you're not my father confessor. I'm not to tell you all. If I
told you that, you'd make another portrait."

"I'm sure I couldn't draw a disparaging picture of anybody you would
really call your friend. But indeed I pity you, living among so many
such people. There can be nobody here who understands you."

"Oh, I'm not very unintelligible."

"Much more so than Miss O'Joscelyn. I shouldn't wish to have to draw
your portrait."

"Pray don't; if it were frightful I should think you uncivil; and if
you made it handsome, I should know you were flattering. Besides, you
don't know enough of me to tell me my character."

"I think I do; but I'll study it a little more before I put it on the
canvass. Some likenesses are very hard to catch."

Fanny felt, when she went to bed, that she had spent a pleasanter
evening than she usually did, and that it was a much less nuisance
to talk to her cousin Adolphus than to either his father, mother, or
sister; and as she sat before her fire, while her maid was brushing
her hair, she began to think that she had mistaken his character, and
that he couldn't be the hard, sensual, selfish man for which she had
taken him. Her ideas naturally fell back to Frank and her love, her
difficulties and sorrows; and, before she went to sleep, she had almost
taught herself to think that she might make Lord Kilcullen the means of
bringing Lord Ballindine back to Grey Abbey.

She had, to be sure, been told that her cousin had spoken ill of Frank;
that it was he who had been foremost in decrying Lord Ballindine's
folly and extravagance; but she had never heard him do so; she had
only heard of it through Lord Cashel; and she quite ceased to believe
anything her guardian might say respecting her discarded lover. At any
rate she would try. Some step she was determined to take about Lord
Ballindine; and, if her cousin refused to act like a cousin and a
friend, she would only be exactly where she was before.

XXXI. THE TWO FRIENDS

The next three days passed slowly and tediously for most of the guest