stone? And I put it to my best friend there,
Father Clement, who's a scholar, up in everything, and he said it was a
name with a pretty sound and an ill meaning--far from tender; and a bad
history too, for she was one of the forty-nine Danaides who killed
their husbands for the sake of their father and was not likely to be the
fiftieth, considering the name she bore. It was for her father's sake
she as good as killed her lover, and the two Adiantes are like enough:
they're as like as a pair of hands with daggers. So that was my brother
Philip's luck! She's married! It's done; it's over, like death: no hope.
And this time it's against her father; it's against her faith. There's
the end of Philip! I could have prophesied it; I did; and when they
broke, from her casting him off--true to her name! thought I. She cast
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