about a backward flight, he drove across the land so foreign to his eyes
and affections, and breasted a strong tide of wishes that it were in a
contrary direction. He would rather have looked upon the desert under
a sand-storm, or upon a London suburb yet he looked thirstingly. Each
variation of landscape of the curved highway offered him in a moment
decisive features: he fitted them to a story he knew: the whole circle
was animated by a couple of pale mounted figures beneath no happy light.
For this was the air once breathed by Adiante Adister, his elder brother
Philip's love and lost love: here she had been to Philip flame along
the hill-ridges, his rose-world in the dust-world, the saintly in his
earthly. And how had she rewarded him for that reverential love of her?
She had forborne to kill him. The bitter sylph of the mountain lures men
to climb till she winds them in vapour and leaves them groping, innocent
of the red crags below. The delicate thing had not picked his bones:
Patrick admitted it; he had seen his brother hale and stout not long
back. But oh! she was merciless, she was a witch. If ever queen-witch
was, she was the crowned one!

For a personal proof, now: he had her all round him in a strange
district though he had never cast eye on her. Yonder bare hill she came
racing up with a plume in the wind: she was over the long brown moor,
look where he would: and vividly was she beside the hurrying beck where
it made edges and chattered white. He had not seen, he could not imagine
her face: angelic dashed with demon beauty, was his idea of the woman,
and there is little of a portrait in that; but he was of a world where
the elemental is more individual than the concrete, and unconceived
of sight she was a recognised presence for the green-island brain of a
youth whose manner of hating was to conjure her spirit from the air and
let fly his own in pursuit of her.

It has to be stated that the object of the youngster's expedition to
Earlsfont was perfectly simple in his mind, however much it went against
his nature to perform it. He came for the purpose of obtaining Miss
Adister's Continental address; to gather what he could of her from her
relatives, and then forthwith to proceed in search of her, that he might
plead with her on behalf of his brother Philip, after a four years'
division of the lovers. Could anything be simpler? He had familiarised
himself with the thought of his advocacy during those four ye