Dinner, and a little piano-music and a song closed an evening that was not dull to Patrick in spite of prolonged silences.  The quiet course of things within the house appeared to him to have a listening ear for big events outside.  He dreaded a single step in the wrong direction, and therefore forbore to hang on any of his conjectures; for he might perchance be unjust to the blessedest heroine on the surface of the earth—­a truly awful thought!  Yet her name would no longer bear the speaking of it to himself.  It conjured up a smoky moon under confounding eclipse.

Who was Schinderhannes?

Mr. Adister had said, her Schinderhannes.

Patrick merely wished to be informed who the man was, and whether he had a title, and was much of a knave:  and particularly Patrick would have liked to be informed of the fellow’s religion.  But asking was not easy.

It was not possible.  And there was a barrel of powder to lay a fiery head on, for a pillow!

To confess that he had not the courage to inquire was as good as an acknowledgment that he knew too much for an innocent questioner.  And what did he know?  His brother Philip’s fair angel forbade him to open the door upon what he knew.  He took a peep through fancy’s keyhole, and delighted himself to think that he had seen nothing.

After a turbulent night with Schinderhannes, who let him go no earlier than the opening of a December day, Patrick hied away to one of the dusky nooks by the lake for a bracing plunge.  He attributed to his desire for it the strange deadness of the atmosphere, and his incapacity to get an idea out of anything he looked on:  he had not a sensation of cold till the stinging element gripped him.  It is the finest school for the cure of dreamers; two minutes of stout watery battle, with the enemy close all round, laughing, but not the less inveterate, convinced him that, in winter at least, we have only to jump out of our clothes to feel the reality of things in a trice.  The dip was sharpening; he could say that his prescription was good for him; his craving to get an idea ceased with it absolutely, and he stood in far better trim to meet his redoubtable adversary of overnight; but the rascal was a bandit and had robbed him of his purse; that was a positive fact; his vision had gone; he felt himself poor and empty and rejoicing in the keenness of his hunger for breakfast, singularly lean.  A youth despoiled of his Vision and made sensible by the activity of his physical state that he is a common machine, is eager for meat, for excess of whatsoever you may offer him; he is on the highroad of recklessness, and had it been the bottle instead of Caroline’s coffee-cup, Patrick would soon have received a priming for a delivery of views upon the sex, and upon love, and the fools known as lovers, acrid enough to win the applause of cynics.

Boasting was the best relief that a young man not without modesty could find.  Mr. Adister complimented him on the robustness of his habits, and Patrick ’would like to hear of the temptation that could keep him from his morning swim.’