to shield and care for her.

How, or where, Beau Power's daughter lived during the next twelve years
must always remain largely a mystery. At one time she appears in Dublin;
at another, in Cahir; but mostly she seems to have spent her time in
England. Over this part of her adventurous life a curtain is drawn;
though some have endeavoured to raise it, and have professed to discover
scandalous doings for which there seems to be no vestige of authority.
We know that, by the time she was twenty, Sir Thomas Lawrence was so
struck by her beauty that he immortalised it on canvas; but it is only
in 1816 that the curtain is actually raised, and we find her living with
her brother in London, where, to quote her sister,

"she received at her house only those whose age and
character rendered them safe friends, and a very few
others, on whose perfect respect and consideration she
could wholly rely. Among the latter was the Earl of
Blessington, then a widower."

Whatever may have been her life during this obscure period, when her
charms were maturing into such exquisite beauty, it is thus certain that
at its close she was moving in a good circle, and was as irreproachable
as she was lovely. Of her rascally husband she had happily seen nothing
during all those years of more or less lonely adventure; and the end of
this tragic union was now near. One day in October 1817, the Captain
ended his misspent days in tragedy. He had drifted through dissipation
and crime to the King's Bench prison; and in a fit of frenzy--or, as
some say, in a drunken quarrel--had flung himself to his death through a
window of his gaol.