twice to receptions given by the Earl
and Countess of Blessington, where he was well received, though this was
only an incident of his English sojourn. Before the story proceeds
any further it is necessary to give an account of the Earl and of Lady
Blessington, since both of their careers had been, to say the least,
unusual.

Lord Blessington was an Irish peer for whom an ancient title had been
revived. He was remotely descended from the Stuarts of Scotland, and
therefore had royal blood to boast of. He had been well educated, and in
many ways was a man of pleasing manner. On the other hand, he had early
inherited a very large property which yielded him an income of about
thirty thousand pounds a year. He had estates in Ireland, and he owned
nearly the whole of a fashionable street in London, with the buildings
erected on it.

This fortune and the absence of any one who could control him had made
him wilful and extravagant and had wrought in him a curious love of
personal display. Even as a child he would clamor to be dressed in the
most gorgeous uniforms; and when he got possession of his property his
love of display became almost a monomania. He built a theater as an
adjunct to his country house in Ireland and imported players from London
and elsewhere to act in it. He loved to mingle with the mummers, to try
on their various costumes, and to parade up and down, now as an oriental
prince and now as a Roman emperor.

In London he hung about the green-rooms, and was a well-known figure
wherever actors or actresses were collected. Such was his love of the
stage that he sought to marry into the profession and set his heart on a
girl named Mary Campbell Browne, who was very beautiful to look at, but
who was not conspicuous either for her mind or for her morals. When Lord
Blessington proposed marriage to her she was obliged to tell him that
she already had one husband still alive, but she was perfectly willing
to live with him and dispense with the marriage ceremony. So for several
years she did live with him and bore him two children.

It speaks well for the earl that when the inconvenient husband died a
marriage at once took place and Mrs. Browne became a countess. Then,
after other children had been born, the lady died, leaving the earl a
widower at about the age of forty. The only legitimate son born of this
marriage followed his mother to the grave; and so for the third time the
earldom of Blessington seemed likely