Later in the day she heard that he was out scouring the country on one of her uncle’s horses.  She had too many distressing matters to think of for so singular a young man to have any other place than that which is given to the fantastical in a troubled and serious mind.  He danced there like the whimsy sunbeam of a shaken water below.  What would be his opinion of Adiante if he knew of her determination to sell the two fair estates she inherited from a grandmother whom she had venerated; that she might furnish arms to her husband to carry out an audacious enterprise likely to involve both of them in blood and ruin?  Would he not bound up aloft and quiver still more wildly?  She respected, quaint though it was, his imaginative heat of feeling for Adiante sufficiently to associate him with her so far; and she lent him in fancy her own bewilderment and grief at her cousin’s conduct, for the soothing that his exaggeration of them afforded her.  She could almost hear his outcry.

The business of the hour demanded more of her than a seeking for refreshment.  She had been invited to join the consultation of her uncle with his lawyer.  Mr. Adister tossed her another letter from Vienna, of that morning’s delivery.  She read it with composure.  It became her task to pay no heed to his loss of patience, and induce him to acquiesce in his legal adviser’s view which was, to temporise further, present an array of obstacles, and by all possible suggestions induce the princess to come over to England, where her father’s influence with her would have a chance of being established again; and it might then be hoped that she, who had never when under sharp temptation acted disobediently to his wishes at home, and who certainly would not have dreamed of contracting the abhorred alliance had she been breathing the air of common sense peculiar to her native land, would see the prudence, if not the solemn obligation, of retaining to herself these family possessions.  Caroline was urgent with her uncle to act on such good counsel.  She marvelled at his opposition, though she detected the principal basis of it.

Mr. Adister had no ground of opposition but his own intemperateness.  The Welsh grandmother’s legacy of her estates to his girl, overlooking her brothers, Colonel Arthur and Captain David, had excessively vexed him, despite the strong feeling he entertained for Adiante; and not simply because of the blow he received in it unexpectedly from that old lady, as the last and heaviest of the long and open feud between them, but also, chiefly, that it outraged and did permanent injury to his ideas of the proper balance of the sexes.  Between himself and Mrs. Winnion Rhys the condition of the balance had been a point of vehement disputation, she insisting to have it finer up to equality, and he that the naturally lighter scale should continue to kick the beam.  Behold now the consequence of the wilful Welshwoman’s insanest of legacies!  The estates were left