‘I may discover that I am about to receive one,’ said she.

They quitted the room together.

Mr. Camminy had seen another Miss Adister duetting with a young Irishman and an O’Donnell, with lamentable results to that union of voices, and he permitted himself to be a little astonished at his respected client’s defective memory or indifference to the admonition of identical circumstances.

CHAPTER V

AT THE PIANO, CHIEFLY WITHOUT MUSIC

Barely had the door shut behind them when Patrick let his heart out:  ’The princess?’ He had a famished look, and Caroline glided along swiftly with her head bent, like one musing; his tone alarmed her; she lent him her ear, that she might get some understanding of his excitement, suddenly as it seemed to have come on him; but he was all in his hungry interrogation, and as she reached her piano and raised the lid, she saw it on tiptoe straining for her answer.

‘I thought you were aware of my cousin’s marriage.’

‘Was I?’ said Patrick, asking it of himself, for his conscience would not acknowledge an absolute ignorance.  ’No:  I fought it, I wouldn’t have a blot on her be suspected.  She’s married!  She’s married to one of their princes!—­married for a title!—­and changed her religion!  And Miss Adister, you’re speaking of Adiante?’

‘My cousin Adiante.’

’Well did I hate the name!  I heard it first over in France.  Our people wrote to me of her; and it’s a name to set you thinking:  Is she tender, or nothing like a woman,—­a stone?  And I put it to my best friend there, Father Clement, who’s a scholar, up in everything, and he said it was a name with a pretty sound and an ill meaning—­far from tender; and a bad history too, for she was one of the forty-nine Danaides who killed their husbands for the sake of their father and was not likely to be the fiftieth, considering the name she bore.  It was for her father’s sake she as good as killed her lover, and the two Adiantes are like enough:  they’re as like as a pair of hands with daggers.  So that was my brother Philip’s luck!  She’s married!  It’s done; it’s over, like death:  no hope.  And this time it’s against her father; it’s against her faith.  There’s the end of Philip!  I could have prophesied it; I did; and when they broke, from her casting him off—­true to her name! thought I. She cast him off, and she couldn’t wait for him, and there’s his heart broken.  And I ready to glorify her for a saint!  And now she must have loved the man, or his title, to change her religion.  She gives him her soul!  No praise to her for that:  but mercy! what a love it must be.  Or else it’s a spell.  But wasn’t she rather one for flinging spells than melting?  Except that we’re all of us hit at last, and generally by our own weapon.  But she loved Philip:  she loved him down to shipwreck and drowning:  she gave battle for him, and against her father; all the place here and the country’s alive with their meetings and partings:—­she can’t have married!  She wouldn’t change her religion for her lover:  how can she have done it for this prince?  Why, it’s to swear false oaths!—­ unless it’s possible for a woman to slip out of herself and be another person after a death like that of a love like hers.’