CHAPTER I.

A BRIGHT sunny spring morning after a night of rain. Heavy clouds, like a dispersed but not beaten army, hung in threatening masses on the brows of a range of dark, slate-coloured mountains that shut in the landscape to the west, while the sun climbing the summit of a lower range of grass-clothed hills on the east made the waters of Lake Corrib dance in its light, and turned the raindrenched trees that surrounded Castle Daly into a forest of diamonds. The house, a solid grey stone, many-windowed mansion, with a turreted roof, and four dilapidated towers ornamenting its sides, stood on a slope between two grassy hills and fronted the head of the lake just where its waters, after narrowing into a river-like channel through a pass in the hills, spread out again into a second shimmering sheet of silver where emerald slopes and purple heads saw themselves reflected.

The front door stood wide open that morning, as it generally did in all but the very worst weather, and from the top of its high stone steps a wide view was commanded. Frowning mountain heads and delicate purple distances, soft green levels shading into the blue of river and lake, the near ground being variegated with every gradation of tint, from black bog land to bright ferny hollows and cultivated fields. Just in front a No. 172.-VOL. XXIX.

lawn sloped from the top of the little eminence on which the house stood to a white road skirting the northern shores of the lake, whose windings the eye could follow till they were lost among the hills. Bold outlines and fair colouring were to be seen at their very best under the radiance of the spring sunshine; but it was not altogether to enjoy them that the different members of the Castle Daly household, as they left their rooms one by one, passed the door of the breakfast parlour where the meal waited for them, and sauntered, hatless and bonnetless, down the hall steps into the rain-drenched garden..

It was more or less a matter of course with them all to spend rather more of their time out of doors than in, and if there was anything to be done at a fixed time, even such a pleasant thing as breakfast, an instinct against punctuality gave zest to a little preliminary dawdling.

First, a boy of about sixteen came out with a book in his hand, at which he gave a careless glance or two before thrusting it into his pocket and rushing across grass-plot and flower-border to join a group of servants who simultaneously left their work, in doors and out, at the sound of a bugle, and flocked to the yard gate to meet the bearer of the post-bag, who just then made his appearance blowing his bugle and driving at an astonishing rate up the road in a jaunting car.

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