him off, and she couldn't wait for him, and there's his heart broken. And
I ready to glorify her for a saint! And now she must have loved the man,
or his title, to change her religion. She gives him her soul! No praise
to her for that: but mercy! what a love it must be. Or else it's a spell.
But wasn't she rather one for flinging spells than melting? Except that
we're all of us hit at last, and generally by our own weapon. But she
loved Philip: she loved him down to shipwreck and drowning: she gave
battle for him, and against her father; all the place here and the
country's alive with their meetings and partings:--she can't have
married! She wouldn't change her religion for her lover: how can she have
done it for this prince? Why, it's to swear false oaths!--unless it's
possible for a woman to slip out of herself and be another person after a
death like that of a love like hers.'

Patrick stopped: the idea demanded a scrutiny.

'She's another person for me,' he said. 'Here's the worst I ever imagined
of her!--thousands of miles and pits of sulphur beyond the worst and the
very worst! I thought her fickle, I thought her heartless, rather a black
fairy, perched above us, not quite among the stars of heaven. I had my
ideas. But never that she was a creature to jump herself down into a gulf
and be lost for ever. She's gone, extinguished--there she is, under the
penitent's hoodcap with eyeholes, before the faggots! and that's what she
has married!--a burning torment, and none of the joys of martyrdom. Oh!
I'm not awake. But I never dreamed of such a thing as this--not the hard,
bare, lump-of-earth-fact:--and that's the only thing to tell me I'm not
dreaming now.'

He subsided again; then deeply beseeching asked:

'Have you by chance a portrait of the gentleman, Miss Adister? Is there
one anywhere?'

Caroline stood at her piano, turning over the leaves of a music-book,
with a pressure on her eyelids. She was near upon being thrilled in spite
of an astonishment almost petrifying: and she could nearly have smiled,
so strange was his fraternal adoption, amounting to a vivification--of
his brother's passion. He seemed quite naturally to impersonate Philip.
She wondered, too, in the coolness of her alien blood, whether he was a
character, or merely an Irish character. As to the unwontedness of the
scene, Ireland was chargeable with that; and Ireland also, a little at
his expense as a citizen of the polite world, relieved him o