recklessly extravagant, squandering alike their feelings and their
money. There wasn't a member of the house of Gaverick decently well to
do, excepting indeed Eliza, Countess of Gaverick. She had been a
Glasgow heiress and only belonged to the aristocracy by right of
marriage with Bridget's uncle, the late Lord Gaverick, who on the death
of his brother, about the time Bridget was grown up, had succeeded to
the earldom, but not to the estate.

Gaverick Castle in the province of Connaught, which with the
unproductive lands appertaining to it, had been in the possession of
O'Haras from time immemorial, was sold by Bridget's father to pay his
debts. His brother--the heiress' husband, who, unlike the traditional
spendthrift O'Haras had accumulated a small fortune in business, was
able by some lucky chance to buy back the Castle--partly with his
wife's money--soon after his accession to the barren honours of the
family. His widow inherited the place as well as the rest of her
husband's property, and could do as she pleased with the whole. Thus
the present holder of that ancient Irish title, young, charming and
poor, stemming from a collateral branch, lived mainly upon his friends
and upon the hope that Eliza, Countess of Gaverick, might at her death
leave him the ancestral home and the wherewithal to maintain it.

As for Bridget's father, the last but one Earl of Gaverick, his career
may be summed up as a series of dramatic episodes, matrimonial, social
and financial.

His first wife had divorced him. His second wife--the mother of Lady
Bridget--had deserted him for an operatic tenor and had died shortly
afterwards. She herself had been an Italian singer.