Patrick stopped:  the idea demanded a scrutiny.

‘She’s another person for me,’ he said.  ’Here’s the worst I ever imagined of her!—­thousands of miles and pits of sulphur beyond the worst and the very worst!  I thought her fickle, I thought her heartless, rather a black fairy, perched above us, not quite among the stars of heaven.  I had my ideas.  But never that she was a creature to jump herself down into a gulf and be lost for ever.  She’s gone, extinguished —­there she is, under the penitent’s hoodcap with eyeholes, before the faggots! and that’s what she has married!—­a burning torment, and none of the joys of martyrdom.  Oh!  I’m not awake.  But I never dreamed of such a thing as this—­not the hard, bare, lump-of-earth-fact:—­and that’s the only thing to tell me I’m not dreaming now.’

He subsided again; then deeply beseeching asked: 

’Have you by chance a portrait of the gentleman, Miss Adister?  Is there one anywhere?’

Caroline stood at her piano, turning over the leaves of a music-book, with a pressure on her eyelids.  She was near upon being thrilled in spite of an astonishment almost petrifying:  and she could nearly have smiled, so strange was his fraternal adoption, amounting to a vivification—­of his brother’s passion.  He seemed quite naturally to impersonate Philip.  She wondered, too, in the coolness of her alien blood, whether he was a character, or merely an Irish character.  As to the unwontedness of the scene, Ireland was chargeable with that; and Ireland also, a little at his expense as a citizen of the polite world, relieved him of the extreme ridicule attached to his phrases and images.

She replied:  ‘We have no portrait.’

‘May I beg to know, have you seen him?’ said Patrick.  Caroline shook her head.

‘Is there no telling what he is like, Miss Adister?’

‘He is not young.’

‘An old man!’

She had not said that, and she wished to defend her cousin from the charge of contracting such an alliance, but Patrick’s face had brightened out of a gloom of stupefaction; he assured her he was now ready to try his voice with hers, only she was to excuse a touch of hoarseness; he felt it slightly in his throat:  and could he, she asked him, wonder at it after his morning’s bath?

He vindicated the saneness of the bath as well as he was able, showing himself at least a good reader of music.  On the whole, he sang pleasantly, particularly French songs.  She complimented him, with an emphasis on the French.  He said, yes, he fancied he did best in French, and he had an idea of settling in France, if he found that he could not live quietly in his own country.

’And becoming a Frenchman?’said Caroline.

‘Why not?’ said he.  ’I ’m more at home with French people; they’re mostly of my creed; they’re amiable, though they weren’t quite kind to poor Lally Tollendal.  I like them.  Yes, I love France, and when I’m called upon to fix myself, as I suppose I shall be some day, I shan’t have the bother over there that I should find here.’