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, choosing to be poor rather than call her forth. He was in truth
digesting with difficulty, as must be the case when it is allotted to
the brains to absorb what the soul abhors.

'Poor old Philip!' was his perpetual refrain. 'Philip, the girl you
loved is married; and here's her portrait taken in her last blush; and
the man who has her hasn't a share in that!' Thus, throwing in the ghost
of a sigh for sympathy, it seemed to Patrick that the intelligence would
have to be communicated. Bang is better, thought he, for bad news than
snapping fire and feinting, when you're bound half to kill a fellow, and
a manly fellow.

Determined that bang it should be, he hurried from the terminus to
Philip's hotel, where he had left him, and was thence despatched to the
house of Captain Con O'Donnell, where he created a joyful confusion,
slightly dashed with rigour on the part of the regnant lady; which is
not to be wondered at, considering that both the gentlemen attending
her, Philip and her husband, quitted her table with shouts at the
announcement of his name, and her husband hauled him in unwashed before
her, crying that the lost was found, the errant returned, the Prodigal
Pat recovered by his kinsman! and she had to submit to the introduction
of the disturber: and a bedchamber had to be thought of for the
unexpected guest, and the dinner to be delayed in middle course, and her
husband corrected between the discussions concerning the bedchamber, and
either the guest permitted to appear at her table in sooty day-garb,
or else a great gap commanded in the service of her dishes, vexatious
extreme for a lady composed of orderlin