ars. His
reluctance to come would have been accountable to the Adisters by a
sentiment of shame at his family's dealings with theirs: in fact, a
military captain of the O'Donnells had in old days played the adventurer
and charmed a maid of a certain age into yielding her hand to him; and
the lady was the squire of Earlsfont's only sister: she possessed funded
property. Shortly after the union, as one that has achieved the goal
of enterprise, the gallant officer retired from the service nor did
north-western England put much to his credit the declaration of his
wife's pronouncing him to be the best of husbands. She naturally said it
of him in eulogy; his own relatives accepted it in some contempt, mixed
with a relish of his hospitality: his wife's were constant in citing his
gain by the marriage. Could he possibly have been less than that? they
exclaimed. An excellent husband, who might easily have been less than
that, he was the most devoted of cousins, and the liberal expenditure of
his native eloquence for the furtherance of Philip's love-suit was the
principal cause of the misfortune, if misfortune it could subsequently
be called to lose an Adiante.

The Adister family were not gifted to read into the heart of a young man
of a fanciful turn. Patrick had not a thought of shame devolving on him
from a kinsman that had shot at a mark and hit it. Who sees the shame
of taking an apple from a garden of the Hesperides? And as England
cultivates those golden, if sometimes wrinkled, fruits, it would have
seemed to him, in thinking about it, an entirely lucky thing for the
finder; while a question of blood would have fired his veins to rival
heat of self-assertion, very loftily towering: there were Kings in
Ireland: cry for one of them in Uladh and you will hear his name, and
he has descendants yet! But the youth was not disposed unnecessarily
to blazon his princeliness. He kept it in modest reserve, as common
gentlemen keep their physical strength. His reluctance to look on
Earlsfont sprang from the same source as unacknowledged craving to see
the place, which had precipitated him thus far upon his road: he had a
horror of scenes where a faithless girl had betrayed her lover. Love was
his visionary temple, and his idea of love was the solitary light in
it, painfully susceptible to coldair currents from the stories of love
abroad over the world. Faithlessness he conceived to be obnoxious to
nature; it stained the earth and was