find in the young Irishman's horror at the husband
of the incomparable beauty now past redemption degraded by her hideous
choice; lost to England and to her father and to common respect. For
none, having once had the picture of the man, could dissociate them;
they were like heaven and its reverse, everlastingly coupled in the mind
by their opposition of characters and aspects. Her father could not,
and he judged of others by himself. He had been all but utterly solitary
since her marriage, brooded on it until it saturated him; too proud
to speak of the thing in sadness, or claim condolence for this wound
inflicted on him by the daughter he had idolised other than through the
indirect method of causing people to wonder at her chosen yoke-fellow.
Their stupefaction refreshed him. Yet he was a gentleman capable of
apprehending 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 chivalr