r-beds in the nooks and corners, no sweet shrubs peeping in at
the square windows. Gardens there are, but they are away, half a mile
off; and the great hall door opens out upon a flat, bleak park, with
hardly a scrap around it which courtesy can call a lawn.

Here, at this period of ours, lived Clara, Countess of Desmond, widow
of Patrick, once Earl of Desmond, and father of Patrick, now Earl of
Desmond. These Desmonds had once been mighty men in their country,
ruling the people around them as serfs, and ruling them with hot iron
rods. But those days were now long gone, and tradition told little of
them that was true. How it had truly fared either with the earl, or
with their serfs, men did not well know; but stories were ever being
told of walls built with human blood, and of the devil bearing off
upon his shoulder a certain earl who was in any other way quite
unbearable, and depositing some small unburnt portion of his remains
fathoms deep below the soil in an old burying-ground near Kanturk.
And there had been a good earl, as is always the case with such
families; but even his virtues, according to tradition, had been of a
useless namby-pamby sort. He had walked to the shrine of St. Finbar,
up in the little island of the Gougane Barra, with unboiled peas in
his shoes; had forgiven his tenants five years' rent all round, and
never drank wine or washed himself after the death of his lady wife.

At the present moment the Desmonds were not so potent either for
good or ill. The late earl had chosen to live in London all his life,
and had sunk down to be the toadying friend, or perhaps I should
more properly say the bullied flunky, of a sensual, wine-bibbing,
gluttonous--king. Late in life, when he was broken in means and
character, he had married. The lady of his choice had been chosen as
an heiress; but there had been some slip between that cup of fortune
and his lip; and she, proud and beautiful, for such she had been--had
neither relieved nor softened the poverty of her profligate old lord.

She was left at his death with two children, of whom the eldest,
Lady Clara Desmond, will be the heroine of this story. The youngest,
Patrick, now Earl of Desmond, was two years younger than his sister,
and will make our acquaintance as a lad fresh from Eton.

In these days money was not plentiful with the Desmonds. Not but
that their estates were as wide almost as their renown, and that the
Desmonds were still great people in t