She was used to his interjections; she sat thinking more of the strange request to her to show Mr. O’Donnell the miniature of Adiante.  She had often thought that her uncle regretted his rejection of Philip.  It appeared so to her now, though not by any consecutive process of reasoning.  She went to fetch the miniature, and gazing on it, she tried to guess at Mr. O’Donnell’s thoughts when doing the same; for who so inflammable as he?  And who, woman or man, could behold this lighted face, with the dark raised eyes and abounding auburn tresses, where the contrast of colours was in itself thrilling, and not admire, or more, half worship, or wholly worship?  She pitied the youth:  she fancied that he would not continue so ingenuously true to his brother’s love of Adiante after seeing it; unless one might hope that the light above beauty distinguishing its noble classic lines, and the energy of radiance, like a morning of chivalrous promise, in the eyes, would subdue him to distant admiration.  These were her flitting thoughts under the spell of her queenly cousin’s visage.  She shut up the miniature-case, and waited to hand it to young Mr. O’Donnell.

CHAPTER VII

THE MINIATURE

Patrick returned to Earlsfont very late; he had but ten minutes to dress for dinner; a short allowance after a heated ride across miry tracks, though he would have expended some of them, in spite of his punctilious respect for the bell of the house entertaining him, if Miss Adister had been anywhere on the stairs or corridors as he rushed away to his room.  He had things to tell; he had not been out over the country for nothing.

Fortunately for his good social principles, the butler at Earlsfont was a wary supervisor of his man; great guest or little guest; Patrick’s linen was prepared for him properly studded; he had only to spring out of one suit into another; and still more fortunately the urgency for a rapid execution of the manoeuvre prevented his noticing a large square envelope posted against the looking-glass of his toilette-table.  He caught sight of it first when pulling down his shirt-cuffs with an air of recovered ease, not to say genial triumph, to think that the feat of grooming himself, washing, dressing and stripping, the accustomed persuasive final sweep of the brush to his hair-crop, was done before the bell had rung.  His name was on the envelope; and under his name, in smaller letters,

Adiante.

‘Shall I?’ said he, doing the thing he asked himself about doing tearing open the paper cover of the portrait of her who had flitted in his head for years unseen.  And there she was, remote but present.

His underlip dropped; he had the look of those who bate breath and swarm their wits to catch a sound.  At last he remembered that the summoning bell had been in his ears a long time back, without his having been sensible of any meaning in it.  He started to and fro.  The treasure he held declined to enter the breast-pocket of his coat, and the other pockets he perhaps, if sentimentally, justly discarded as being beneath the honour of serving for a temporary casket.  He locked it up, with a vow to come early to rest.  Even then he had thoughts whether it might be safe.