IONS UPON WELSHWOMEN AND THE
CAMBRIAN RACE

Later in the day she heard that he was out scouring the country on one
of her uncle's horses. She had too many distressing matters to think of
for so singular a young man to have any other place than that which is
given to the fantastical in a troubled and serious mind. He danced
there like the whimsy sunbeam of a shaken water below. What would be his
opinion of Adiante if he knew of her determination to sell the two fair
estates she inherited from a grandmother whom she had venerated;
that she might furnish arms to her husband to carry out an audacious
enterprise likely to involve both of them in blood and ruin? Would he
not bound up aloft and quiver still more wildly? She respected, quaint
though it was, his imaginative heat of feeling for Adiante sufficiently
to associate him with her so far; and she lent him in fancy her own
bewilderment and grief at her cousin's conduct, for the soothing that
his exaggeration of them afforded her. She could almost hear his outcry.

The business of the hour demanded more of her than a seeking for
refreshment. She had been invited to join the consultation of her uncle
with his lawyer. Mr. Adister tossed her another letter from Vienna, of
that morning's delivery. She read it with composure. It became her task
to pay no heed to his loss of patience, and induce him to acquiesce in
his legal adviser's view which was, to temporise further, present an
array of obstacles, and by all possible suggestions induce the princess
to come over to England, where her father's influence with her would
have a chance of being established again; and it might then be hoped
that she, who had never when under sharp temptation acted disobediently
to his wishes at home, and who certainly would not have dreamed of
contracting the abhorred alliance had she been breathing the air of
common sense peculiar to her native land, would see the prudence, if not
the solemn obligation, of retaining to herself these family possessions.
Caroline was urgent with her uncle to act on such good counsel. She
marvelled at his opposition, though she detected the principal basis of
it.

Mr. Adister had no ground of opposition but his own intemperateness. The
Welsh grandmother's legacy of her estates to his girl, overlooking her
brothers, Colonel Arthur and Captain David, had excessively vexed him,
despite the strong feeling he entertained for Adiante; and not simply
because of the blo