and cleverness enough to see the difficulties of her position;
besides, poor child, the gaiety and life of a city will be a relief to
her, after the dreary and monotonous existence she has passed with me."

This latter reason he plausibly represented to himself as a strong one
for complying with what his altered fortunes and ruined prospects seemed
to render no longer a matter of choice.

To the Rooneys, indeed, Miss Bellew's visit was a matter of some
consequence; it was like the recognition of some petty state by one
of the great powers of Europe. It was an acknowledgment of a social
existence, an evidence to the world not only that there was such a thing
as the kingdom of Rooney, but also that it was worth while to enter into
negotiation with it, and even accredit an ambassador to its court.

Little did that fair and lovely girl think, as with tearful eyes she
turned again and again to embrace her father, as the hour arrived, when
for the first time in her life she was to leave her home, little did she
dream of the circumstances under which her visit was to be paid. Less
a guest than a hostage, she was about to quit the home of her infancy,
where, notwithstanding the inroads of poverty, a certain air of its once
greatness still lingered; the broad and swelling lands, that stretched
away with wood and coppice, far as the eye could reach--the woodland
walks--the ancient house itself, with its discordant pile, accumulated
at different times by different masters--all told of power and supremacy
in the land of her fathers. The lonely solitude of those walls, peopled
alone by the grim-visaged portraits of long-buried ancestors, were now
to be exchanged for the noise and bustle, the glitter and the glare of
second-rate city life; profusion and extravagance, where she had seen
but thrift and forbearance; the gossip, the scandal, the tittle-tattle
of society, with its envies, its jealousies, its petty rivalries, and
its rancours, were to supply those quiet evenings beside the winter
hearth, when reading aloud some old and valued volume she learned to
prize the treasures of our earlier writers under the guiding taste of
one whose scholarship was of no mean order, and whose cultivated mind
was imbued with all the tenderness and simplicity of a refined and
gentle nature.

When fortune smiled, when youth and wealth, an ancient name and a high
position, all concurred to elevate him, Sir Simon Bellew was courteous
almost to humi