The ease and kindliness of spirit with which she sat between the two old men, listening in turn to each, or answering with graceful alacrity the questions they proffered--the playful delicacy with which she evaded the allusions they made from time to time to the disappointment the ruined house must have occasioned her--and the laughing gaiety with which she spoke of the new life about to open before her, were actually contagious. They already forgot the fears her anticipated coming had inspired; and gazed on her with the warm affection that should wait on a welcome. Oh! what a gift is beauty, and how powerful its influence, when strengthened by the rich eloquence of a spotless nature, beaming from beneath long-lashed lids, when two men like these, seared and hardened by the world's ills--broken on the wheel of fortune--should feel a glow of long-forgotten gladness in their chilled hearts as they looked upon her? None could have guessed, however, what an effort that seeming light-heartedness cost her. Poor girl! Scarcely was she alone, and had closed the door of her room behind her, when she fell upon the bed in a torrent of tears, and sobbed as if her heart was breaking. All that Father Luke had said as they came along--and the kind old man had done his utmost to break the shock of the altered state of her uncle's fortunes--was far from preparing her for the cold reality she witnessed. It was not the ruined walls, the treeless mountain, the desolate and dreary look of all around, that smote upon her heart; sad as these signs were, her grief had a higher source: it was the sight of that old man she called father, tottering feebly to the grave, surrounded by images of poverty and misfortune. It was the aspect of Mark, the cousin, she had pictured to her mind as an accomplished gentleman in look and demeanour; the descendant of a house more than noble--the heir of a vast property; and now she saw him, scarce in gesture and manner above the peasant--in dress, as slovenly and uncared for. She was prepared for a life of monotonous retirement and isolation. She was ready to face the long winter of dreary solitude--but not in such company as this. That she never calculated on. Her worst anticipations had never conjured up more than an unchequered existence, with little to vary or relieve it; and now, she foresaw a life to be passed amid the miserable straits and shifts of poverty, with all its petty incidents and lowering accidents, to lessen her esteem for those she wished to look up to and love. And this was Carrig-na-curra, the proud castle she had so often boasted of to her school companions, the baronial seat she had loved to exalt above the antique chateaux of France and Flanders; and these the haughty relatives, whose pride she mentioned as disdaining the alliance of the Saxon, and spurning all admixture of blood with a race less noble than their own. The very chamber she sat in, how did it contradict her own animated descriptions of its once comforts and luxuries! Alas! it seemed to be like duplicity and falsehood, that she had so spoken of these things. More than once she asked herself--“Were they always thus?” Poor child! she knew not that poverty can bring sickness, and sorrow and premature old age. It can devastate the fields, and desolate the affections, and make cold both heart and home together!