like a
waiting-maid in the abandoned finery of her mistress.

As she progressed in fortune, she "tried back" for a family, and
discovered that she was an O'Toole by birth, and consequently of Irish
blood-royal; a certain O'Toole being king of a nameless tract, in an
unknown year, somewhere about the time of Cromwell, who, Mrs. Rooney had
heard, came over with the Romans.

"Ah, yes, my dear," as she would say when, softened by sherry and
sorrow, she would lay her hand upon your arm--"ah, yes, if every one had
their own, it isn't married to an attorney I'd be, but living in regal
splendour in the halls of my ancestors. Well, well!" Here she would
throw up her eyes with a mixed expression of grief and confidence in
Heaven, that if she hadn't got her own, in this world, Oliver Cromwell,
at least, was paying off, in the other, his foul wrongs to the royal
house of O'Toole.

I have only one person more to speak of ere I conclude my rather prolix
account of the family. Miss Louisa Bellew was the daughter of an Irish
baronet, who put the keystone upon his ruin by his honest opposition
to the passing of the Union. His large estates, loaded with debt
and encumbered by mortgage, had been for half a century a kind of
battle-field for legal warfare at every assizes. Through the medium of
his difficulties he became acquainted with Mr. Rooney, whose craft
and subtlety had rescued him from more than one difficulty, and whose
good-natured assistance had done still more important service by loans
upon his property.

At Mr. Rooney's suggestion, Miss Bellew was invited to pass her winter
with them in Dublin. This proposition which, in the palmier days of the
baronet's fortune, would in all probability never have been made, and
would certainly never have been accepted, was now entertained with some
consideration, and finally acceded to, on prudential motives. Rooney had
lent him large sums; he had never been a pressing, on the contrary, he
was a lenient creditor; possessing great power over the property, he had
used it sparingly, even delicately, and showed himself upon more than
one occasion not only a shrewd adviser, but a warm friend. "'Tis true,"
thought Sir Simon, "they are vulgar people, of coarse tastes and low
habits, and those with whom they associate laugh at, though they live
upon them; yet, after all, to refuse this invitation may be taken in ill
part; a few months will do the whole thing. Louisa, although young,
has tact