rehending simultaneously that he sinned
against his pride in the means he adopted to comfort his nature. But the
wound was a perpetual sickness needing soul-medicine. Proud as he was,
and unbending, he was not stronger than his malady, and he could
disguise, he could not contain, the cry of immoderate grief. Adiante had
been to him something beyond a creature beloved; she had with her
glorious beauty and great-heartedness been the sole object which had ever
inspirited his imagination. He could have thought no man, not the most
illustrious, worthy of her. And there she was, voluntarily in the hands
of a monster! 'Husband!' Mr. Adister broke away from Caroline, muttering:
'Her husband's policy!'

She was used to his interjections; she sat thinking more of the strange
request to her to show Mr. O'Donnell the miniature of Adiante. She had
often thought that her uncle regretted his rejection of Philip. It
appeared so to her now, though not by any consecutive process of
reasoning. She went to fetch the miniature, and gazing on it, she tried
to guess at Mr. O'Donnell's thoughts when doing the same; for who so
inflammable as he? And who, woman or man, could behold this lighted face,
with the dark raised eyes and abounding auburn tresses, where the
contrast of colours was in itself thrilling, and not admire, or more,
half worship, or wholly worship? She pitied the youth: she fancied that
he would not continue so ingenuously true to his brother's love of
Adiante after seeing it; unless one might hope that the light above
beauty distinguishing its noble classic lines, and the energy of
radiance, like a morning of chivalrous promise, in the eyes, would subdue
him to distant admiration. These were her flitting thoughts under the
spell of her queenly cousin's visage. She shut up the miniature-case, and
waited to hand it to young Mr. O'Donnell.

CHAPTER VII

THE MINIATURE

Patrick returned to Earlsfont very late; he had but ten minutes to dress
for dinner; a short allowance after a heated ride across miry tracks,
though he would have expended some of them, in spite of his punctilious
respect for the bell of the house entertaining him, if Miss Adister had
been anywhere on the stairs or corridors as he rushed away to his room.
He had things to tell; he had not been out over the country for nothing.

Fortunately for his good social principles, the butler at Earlsfont was a
wary supervisor of his man; great guest or little gues