With the ornaments on the walls and ceilings cleaned and brightened up, and with the heavy old-fashioned beds, chairs, and tables replaced by bright, pretty, and luxurious modern furniture, these two promised to be at once the most attractive and the most comfortable bedchambers in the hotel.

As for the once-desolate and disused ground floor of the building, it was now transformed, by means of splendid dining-rooms, reception-rooms, billiard-rooms, and smoking-rooms, into a palace by itself.

Even the dungeon-like vaults beneath, now lighted and ventilated on the most approved modern plan, had been turned as if by magic into kitchens, servants' offices, ice-rooms, and wine cellars, worthy of the splendour of the grandest hotel in Italy, in the now bygone period of seventeen years since.
Passing from the lapse of the summer months at Venice, to the lapse of the summer months in Ireland, it is next to be recorded that Mrs.
Rolland obtained the situation of attendant on the invalid Mrs.
Carbury; and that the fair Miss Haldane, like a female Caesar, came, saw, and conquered, on her first day's visit to the new Lord Montbarry's house.
The ladies were as loud in her praises as Arthur Barville himself.
Lord Montbarry declared that she was the only perfectly pretty woman he had ever seen, who was really unconscious of her own attractions.

The old nurse said she looked as if she had just stepped out of a picture, and wanted nothing but a gilt frame round her to make her complete.
Miss Haldane, on her side, returned from her first visit to the Montbarrys charmed with her new acquaintances.

Later on the same day, Arthur called with an offering of fruit and flowers for Mrs.Carbury, and with instructions to ask if she was well enough to receive Lord and Lady Montbarry and Miss Lockwood on the morrow.