And sometimes she felt, or feared to feel, that it might beat high again when she should again see the lover whom her judgment had rejected.
Her judgment had rejected him altogether long before an idea had at all presented itself to her that Herbert Fitzgerald could become her suitor.

Nor had this been done wholly in obedience to her mother's mandate.

She had realized in her own mind the conviction that Owen Fitzgerald was not a man with whom any girl could at present safely link her fortune.

She knew well that he was idle, dissipated, and extravagant; and she could not believe that these vices had arisen only from his banishment from her, and that they would cease and vanish whenever that banishment might cease.
Messages came to her, in underhand ways--ways well understood in Ireland, and not always ignored in England--to the effect that all his misdoings arose from his unhappiness; that he drank and gambled only because the gates of Desmond Court were no longer open to him.
There was that in Clara's heart which did for a while predispose her to believe somewhat of this, to hope that it might not be altogether false.

Could any girl loving such a man not have had some such hope?
But then the stories of these revelries became worse and worse, and it was dinned into her ears that these doings had been running on in all their enormity before that day of his banishment.