politician, liberal to the
verge of radicalism. If the Irish Church had not been disestablished
before Lord Mallow went into Parliament, he would have gripped his
destructive axe and had a chop or two at the root of that fine old
tree. Protestant, and loyal to the Church of England in his own
person--so far as such loyalty may be testified by regular attendance
at divine service every Sunday morning, and a gentlemanlike reverence
for bishops--it seemed to him not the less an injustice that his native
land should be taxed with the maintenance of an alien clergy.

The late Lord Mallow had been a violent Tory, Orange to the marrow of
his bones. The new Lord Mallow was violently progressive, enthusiastic
in his belief in Hibernian virtues, and his indignation at Hibernian
wrongs. He wanted to disestablish everything. He saw his country as she
appears in the eyes of her poets and song-writers--a fair dishevelled
female, oppressed by the cruel Sassenach, a lovely sufferer for whose
rescue all true men and leal would fight to the death. He quoted the
outrages of Elizabeth's reign, the cruelties of Cromwell's soldiery,
the savagery of Ginkell, as if those wrongs had been inflicted
yesterday, and the House of Commons of to-day were answerable for them.
He made fiery speeches which were reported at length in the Irish
newspapers. He was a fine speaker, after a florid pattern, and had a
great command of voice, and a certain rugged eloquence that carried his
hearers along with him, even when he was harping upon so hackneyed a
string as the wrongs of "Ould Ireland."

Lord Mallow was not thirty, and he looked younger than his years. He
was tall and broad-shouldered, robust, and a trifle clumsy in figure,
and rode fourteen stone. He had a good-looking Irish face, smiling blue
eyes, black hair, white teeth, bushy whiskers, and a complexion
inclining to rosiness.

"He is the perfection of a commonplace young man," Vixen said, when she
talked him over with her mother on the day of his arrival at the Abbey
House.

"Come, Violet, you must admit that he is very handsome," remonstrated
Mrs. Winstanley, who was sitting before her dressing-room fire, with
her feet on a fender-stool of her own crewel-work, waiting for Pauline
to commence the important ceremony of dressing for dinner. "I think I
never saw a finer set of teeth, and of course at his age they must all
be real."

"Unless he has had a few of the original ones knocked out in the