eer counsel, that we should set to work
by buying a bit of land to win a clean footing to rob our neighbours: and
his brains took another shot at Mr. Adister, this time without
penetrating. He could very well have seen the matter he disliked in a man
that he disliked; but the father of Adiante had touched him with the gift
of the miniature.

Patrick was not asked to postpone his departure from Earlsfont, nor was
he invited to come again. Mr. Adister drove him to the station in the
early morning, and gave him a single nod from the phaeton-box for a
good-bye. Had not Caroline assured him at the leave-taking between them
that he had done her uncle great good by his visit, the blank of the
usual ceremonial phrases would have caused him to fancy himself an
intruder courteously dismissed, never more to enter the grand old Hall.
He was further comforted by hearing the stationmaster's exclamation of
astonishment and pleasure at the sight of the squire 'in his place'
handling the reins, which had not been witnessed for many a day and so it
appeared that the recent guest had been exceptionally complimented. 'But
why not a warm word, instead of turning me off to decipher a bit of
Egyptian on baked brick,' he thought, incurably Celtic as he was.

From the moment when he beheld Mr. Adister's phaeton mounting a hill that
took the first leap for the Cambrian highlands, up to his arrival in
London, scarcely one of his 'ideas' darted out before Patrick, as they
were in the habit of doing, like the enchanted bares of fairyland,
tempting him to pursue, and changing into the form of woman ever, at some
turn of the chase. For as he had travelled down to Earlsfont in the state
of ignorance and hopefulness, bearing the liquid brains of that young
condition, so did his acquisition of a particular fact destructive of
hope solidify them about it as he travelled back: in other words, they
were digesting what they had taken in. Imagination would not have stirred
for a thousand fleeting hares: and principally, it may be, because he was
conscious that no form of woman would anywhere come of them. Woman was
married; she had the ring on her finger! He could at his option look on
her in the miniature, he could think of her as being in the city where
she had been painted; but he could not conjure her out of space; she was
nowhere in the ambient air. Secretly she was a feeling that lay half
slumbering very deep down within him, and he kept the secret, ch