Her uncle’s attentiveness incited her to describe the scene, and as it visibly relieved his melancholy, she did it with a few vivid indications of the quaint young Irishman’s manner of speech.  She concluded:  ’At last he begged to see a portrait of her husband.’

‘Not of her?’ said Mr. Adister abruptly.

‘No; only of her husband.’

‘Show him her portrait.’

A shade of surprise was on Caroline’s forehead.  ‘Shall I?’ She had a dim momentary thought that the sight of the beautiful face would not be good for Patrick.

’Yes; let him see the woman who could throw herself away on that branded villain called a prince, abjuring her Church for a little fouler than hangman to me and every gentleman alive.  I desire that he should see it.  Submission to the demands of her husband’s policy required it of her, she says!  Show it him when he returns; you have her miniature in your keeping.  And to-morrow take him to look at the full-length of her before she left England and ceased to be a lady of our country.  I will order it to be placed in the armoury.  Let him see the miniature of her this day.’

Mr. Adister resolved at the same time that Patrick should have his portrait of the prince for a set-off to the face of his daughter.  He craved the relief it would be to him to lay his colours on the prince for the sparkling amazement of one whom, according to Caroline’s description, he could expect to feel with him acutely, which neither his niece nor his lawyer had done:  they never did when he painted the prince.  He was unstrung, heavily plunged in the matter of his chagrin and grief:  his unhealed wound had been scraped and strewn with salt by his daughter’s letter; he had a thirst for the kind of sympathy he supposed he would find in the young Irishman’s horror at the husband of the incomparable beauty now past redemption degraded by her hideous choice; lost to England and to her father and to common respect.  For none, having once had the picture of the man, could dissociate them; they were like heaven and its reverse, everlastingly coupled in the mind by their opposition of characters and aspects.  Her father could not, and he judged of others by himself.  He had been all but utterly solitary since her marriage, brooded on it until it saturated him; too proud to speak of the thing in sadness, or claim condolence for this wound inflicted on him by the daughter he had idolised other than through the indirect method of causing people to wonder at her chosen yoke-fellow.  Their stupefaction refreshed him.  Yet he was a gentleman capable of apprehending simultaneously that he sinned against his pride in the means he adopted to comfort his nature.  But the wound was a perpetual sickness needing soul-medicine.  Proud as he was, and unbending, he was not stronger than his malady, and he could disguise, he could not contain, the cry of immoderate grief.  Adiante had been to him something beyond a creature beloved; she had with her glorious beauty and great-heartedness been the sole object which had ever inspirited his imagination.  He could have thought no man, not the most illustrious, worthy of her.  And there she was, voluntarily in the hands of a monster!  ‘Husband!’ Mr. Adister broke away from Caroline, muttering:  ‘Her husband’s policy!’