himself to think that he had seen nothing.

After a turbulent night with Schinderhannes, who let him go no earlier
than the opening of a December day, Patrick hied away to one of the dusky
nooks by the lake for a bracing plunge. He attributed to his desire for
it the strange deadness of the atmosphere, and his incapacity to get an
idea out of anything he looked on: he had not a sensation of cold till
the stinging element gripped him. It is the finest school for the cure of
dreamers; two minutes of stout watery battle, with the enemy close all
round, laughing, but not the less inveterate, convinced him that, in
winter at least, we have only to jump out of our clothes to feel the
reality of things in a trice. The dip was sharpening; he could say that
his prescription was good for him; his craving to get an idea ceased with
it absolutely, and he stood in far better trim to meet his redoubtable
adversary of overnight; but the rascal was a bandit and had robbed him of
his purse; that was a positive fact; his vision had gone; he felt himself
poor and empty and rejoicing in the keenness of his hunger for breakfast,
singularly lean. A youth despoiled of his Vision and made sensible by the
activity of his physical state that he is a common machine, is eager for
meat, for excess of whatsoever you may offer him; he is on the highroad
of recklessness, and had it been the bottle instead of Caroline's
coffee-cup, Patrick would soon have received a priming for a delivery of
views upon the sex, and upon love, and the fools known as lovers, acrid
enough to win the applause of cynics.

Boasting was the best relief that a young man not without modesty could
find. Mr. Adister complimented him on the robustness of his habits, and
Patrick 'would like to hear of the temptation that could keep him from
his morning swim.'

Caroline's needle-thrust was provoked:

'Would not Arctic weather deter you, Mr. O'Donnell?' He hummed, and her
eyes filled with the sparkle.

'Short of Arctic,' he had to say. 'But a gallop, after an Arctic bath,
would soon spin the blood-upon an Esquimaux dog, of course,' he pursued,
to anticipate his critic's remark on the absence of horses, with a bow.

She smiled, accepting the mental alertness he fastened on her.

We must perforce be critics of these tear-away wits; which are, moreover,
so threadbare to conceal the character! Caroline led him to vaunt his
riding and his shooting, and a certain time passed before s