excommunicated; there could be no
pardon of the crime, barely any for repentance. He conceived it in the
feminine; for men are not those holy creatures whose conduct strikes on
the soul with direct edge: a faithless man is but a general villain or
funny monster, a subject rejected of poets, taking no hue in the flat
chronicle of history: but a faithless woman, how shall we speak of her!
Women, sacredly endowed with beauty and the wonderful vibrating note
about the very mention of them, are criminal to hideousness when they
betray. Cry, False! on them, and there is an instant echo of bleeding
males in many circles, like the poor quavering flute-howl of transformed
beasts, which at some remembering touch bewail their higher state. Those
women are sovereignly attractive, too, loathsomely. Therein you may
detect the fiend.

Our moralist had for some time been glancing at a broad, handsome
old country mansion on the top of a wooded hill backed by a swarm of
mountain heads all purple-dark under clouds flying thick to shallow,
as from a brush of sepia. The dim silver of half-lighted lakewater shot
along below the terrace. He knew the kind of sky, having oftener seen
that than any other, and he knew the house before it was named to him
and he had flung a discolouring thought across it. He contemplated it
placably and studiously, perhaps because the shower-folding armies of
the fields above likened its shadowed stillness to that of his Irish
home. There had this woman lived! At the name of Earlsfont she became
this witch, snake, deception. Earlsfont was the title and summary of her
black story: the reverberation of the word shook up all the chapters to
pour out their poison.

CHAPTER II. MR. ADISTER

Mr. Patrick O'Donnell drove up to the gates of Earlsfont notwithstanding
these emotions, upon which light matter it is the habit of men of his
blood too much to brood; though it is for our better future to have a
capacity for them, and the insensible race is the oxenish.

But if he did so when alone, the second man residing in the Celt put
that fellow by and at once assumed the social character on his being
requested to follow his card into Mr. Adister's library. He took his
impression of the hall that had heard her voice, the stairs she had
descended, the door she had passed through, and the globes she had
perchance laid hand on, and the old mappemonde, and the severely-shining
orderly regiment of books breathing of her