ous promise, in the eyes, would
subdue him to distant admiration. These were her flitting thoughts
under the spell of her queenly cousin's visage. She shut up the
miniature-case, and waited to hand it to young Mr. O'Donnell.

CHAPTER VII. THE MINIATURE

Patrick returned to Earlsfont very late; he had but ten minutes to dress
for dinner; a short allowance after a heated ride across miry tracks,
though he would have expended some of them, in spite of his punctilious
respect for the bell of the house entertaining him, if Miss Adister had
been anywhere on the stairs or corridors as he rushed away to his room.
He had things to tell; he had not been out over the country for nothing.

Fortunately for his good social principles, the butler at Earlsfont was
a wary supervisor of his man; great guest or little guest; Patrick's
linen was prepared for him properly studded; he had only to spring out
of one suit into another; and still more fortunately the urgency for a
rapid execution of the manoeuvre prevented his noticing a large square
envelope posted against the looking-glass of his toilette-table. He
caught sight of it first when pulling down his shirt-cuffs with an air
of recovered ease, not to say genial triumph, to think that the feat
of grooming himself, washing, dressing and stripping, the accustomed
persuasive final sweep of the brush to his hair-crop, was done before
the bell had rung. His name was on the envelope; and under his name, in
smaller letters,

Adiante.

'Shall I?' said he, doing the thing he asked himself about doing tearing
open the paper cover of the portrait of her who had flitted in his head
for years unseen. And there she was, remote but present.

His underlip dropped; he had the look of those who bate breath and swarm
their wits to catch a sound. At last he remembered that the summoning
bell had been in his ears a long time back, without his having been
sensible of any meaning in it. He started to and fro. The treasure he
held declined to enter the breast-pocket of his coat, and the other
pockets he perhaps, if sentimentally, justly discarded as being beneath
the honour of serving for a temporary casket. He locked it up, with a
vow to come early to rest. Even then he had thoughts whether it might be
safe.

Who spoke, and what they uttered at the repast, and his own remarks, he
was unaware of. He turned right and left a brilliant countenance that
had the glitter of frost-light; it sparkled a