d of her beauty, and tasted a full share of those attentions which
often fall to the lot of brothers of handsome girls.

Then Matty was an heiress, that is, she had twelve thousand pounds in her
own right; and Ireland was not such a California as to make a very pretty
girl with twelve thousand pounds an everyday chance. She had numerous
offers of marriage, and with the usual luck in such cases, there were
commonplace unattractive men with good means, and there were clever and
agreeable fellows without a sixpence, all alike ineligible. Matty had
that infusion of romance in her nature that few, if any, Irish girls are
free from, and which made her desire that the man of her choice should be
something out of the common. She would have liked a soldier who had won
distinction in the field. The idea of military fame was very dear to her
Irish heart, and she fancied with what pride she would hang upon the arm
of one whose gay trappings and gold embroidery emblematised the career
he followed. If not a soldier, she would have liked a great orator, some
leader in debate that men would rush down to hear, and whose glowing words
would be gathered up and repeated as though inspirations; after that a
poet, and perhaps--not a painter--a sculptor, she thought, might do.

With such aspirations as these, it is not surprising that she rejected the
offers of those comfortable fellows in Meath, or Louth, whose military
glories were militia drills, and whose eloquence was confined to the bench
of magistrates.

At three-and-twenty she was in the full blaze of her beauty; at
three-and-thirty she was still unmarried, her looks on the wane, but her
romance stronger than ever, not untinged perhaps with a little bitterness
towards that sex which had not afforded one man of merit enough to woo
and win her. Partly out of pique with a land so barren of all that could
minister to imagination, partly in anger with her brother who had been
urging her to a match she disliked, she went abroad to travel, wandered
about for a year or two, and at last found herself one winter at Naples.

There was at that time, as secretary to the Greek legation, a young fellow
whom repute called the handsomest man in Europe; he was a certain Spiridion
Kostalergi, whose title was Prince of Delos, though whether there was such
a principality, or that he was its representative, society was not fully
agreed upon. At all events, Miss Kearney met him at a Court ball, when
he wo