letter, and upon the contrast
of his ingenuous look with the powerful cast of his head. She fancied a
certain danger about him; of what kind she could not quite distinguish,
for it had no reference to woman's heart, and he was too young to be
much of a politician, and he was not in the priesthood. His transparency
was of a totally different order from Captain Con's, which proclaimed
itself genuine by the inability to conceal a shoal of subterfuges. The
younger cousin's features carried a something invisible behind them, and
she was just perceptive enough to spy it, and it excited her suspicions.
Irishmen both she and her brother had to learn to like, owing to their
bad repute for stability: they are, moreover, Papists: they are not
given to ideas: that one of the working for the future has not struck
them. In fine, they are not solid, not law-supporting, not disposed to
be (humbly be it said) beneficent, like the good English. These were her
views, and as she held it a weakness to have to confess that Irishmen
are socially more fascinating than the good English, she was on her
guard against them.

Of course the letter had gone. She heard of it before the commencement
of the dinner, after Mrs. Adister had introduced Captain Philip
O'Donnell to her, and while she was exchanging a word or two with
Colonel Adister, who stood ready to conduct her to the table. If he
addressed any remarks to the lady under his charge, Miss Mattock did not
hear him; and she listened--who shall say why? His unlike likeness to
his brother had struck her. Patrick opposite was flowing in speech. But
Captain Philip O'Donnell's taciturnity seemed no uncivil gloom: it wore
nothing of that look of being beneath the table, which some of our good
English are guilty of at their social festivities, or of towering aloof
a Matterhorn above it, in the style of Colonel Adister. Her discourse
with the latter amused her passing reflections. They started a subject,
and he punctuated her observations, or she his, and so they speedily ran
to earth.

'I think,' says she, 'you were in Egypt this time last winter.'

He supplies her with a comma: 'Rather later.'

Then he carries on the line. 'Dull enough, if you don't have the right
sort of travelling crew in your boat.'

'Naturally,' she puts her semicolon, ominous of the full stop.

'I fancy you have never been in Egypt?'

'No'

There it is; for the tone betrays no curiosity about Egypt and her Nile,
and