of feeling was
novel to Patrick. He began to see that he was not implicated in a wrath
that referred to some great offender, and Mr. Adister soon confirmed his
view by saying: 'You are no disgrace to your begetting, sir!'

With that he quitted his chair, and hospitably proposed to conduct his
guest over the house and grounds.

CHAPTER III. CAROLINE

Men of the Adister family having taken to themselves brides of a very
dusty pedigree from the Principality, there were curious rough
heirlooms to be seen about the house, shields on the armoury walls and
hunting-horns, and drinking-horns, and spears, and chain-belts bearing
clasps of heads of beasts; old gold ornaments, torques, blue-stone
necklaces, under glass-cases, were in the library; huge rings that must
have given the wearers fearful fists; a shirt of coarse linen with a
pale brown spot on the breast, like a fallen beech-leaf; and many sealed
parchment-skins, very precious, for an inspection of which, as Patrick
was bidden to understand, History humbly knocked at the Earlsfont
hall-doors; and the proud muse made her transcripts of them kneeling.
He would have been affected by these wonders had any relic of Adiante
appeased his thirst. Or had there been one mention of her, it would have
disengaged him from the incessant speculations regarding the daughter of
the house, of whom not a word was uttered. No portrait of her was shown.
Why was she absent from her home so long? where was she? How could her
name be started? And was it she who was the sinner in her father's
mind? But the idolatrous love between Adiante and her father was once
a legend: they could not have been cut asunder. She had offered up her
love of Philip as a sacrifice to it: Patrick recollected that, and now
with a softer gloom on his brooding he released her from the burden
of his grand charge of unfaithfulness to the truest of lovers, by
acknowledging that he was in the presence of the sole rival of his
brother. Glorious girl that she was, her betrayal of Philip had nothing
of a woman's base caprice to make it infamous: she had sacrificed him to
her reading of duty; and that was duty to her father; and the point of
duty was in this instance rather a sacred one. He heard voices murmur
that she might be praised. He remonstrated with them, assuring them, as
one who knew, that a woman's first duty is her duty to her lover; her
parents are her second thought. Her lover, in the consideration of a
r