Patrick was not asked to postpone his departure from Earlsfont, nor was he invited to come again.  Mr. Adister drove him to the station in the early morning, and gave him a single nod from the phaeton-box for a good-bye.  Had not Caroline assured him at the leave-taking between them that he had done her uncle great good by his visit, the blank of the usual ceremonial phrases would have caused him to fancy himself an intruder courteously dismissed, never more to enter the grand old Hall.  He was further comforted by hearing the stationmaster’s exclamation of astonishment and pleasure at the sight of the squire ‘in his place’ handling the reins, which had not been witnessed for many a day and so it appeared that the recent guest had been exceptionally complimented.  ’But why not a warm word, instead of turning me off to decipher a bit of Egyptian on baked brick,’ he thought, incurably Celtic as he was.

From the moment when he beheld Mr. Adister’s phaeton mounting a hill that took the first leap for the Cambrian highlands, up to his arrival in London, scarcely one of his ‘ideas’ darted out before Patrick, as they were in the habit of doing, like the enchanted bares of fairyland, tempting him to pursue, and changing into the form of woman ever, at some turn of the chase.  For as he had travelled down to Earlsfont in the state of ignorance and hopefulness, bearing the liquid brains of that young condition, so did his acquisition of a particular fact destructive of hope solidify them about it as he travelled back:  in other words, they were digesting what they had taken in.  Imagination would not have stirred for a thousand fleeting hares:  and principally, it may be, because he was conscious that no form of woman would anywhere come of them.  Woman was married; she had the ring on her finger!  He could at his option look on her in the miniature, he could think of her as being in the city where she had been painted; but he could not conjure her out of space; she was nowhere in the ambient air.  Secretly she was a feeling that lay half slumbering very deep down within him, and he kept the secret, choosing to be poor rather than call her forth.  He was in truth digesting with difficulty, as must be the case when it is allotted to the brains to absorb what the soul abhors.

‘Poor old Philip!’ was his perpetual refrain.  ’Philip, the girl you loved is married; and here’s her portrait taken in her last blush; and the man who has her hasn’t a share in that!’ Thus, throwing in the ghost of a sigh for sympathy, it seemed to Patrick that the intelligence would have to be communicated.  Bang is better, thought he, for bad news than snapping fire and feinting, when you’re bound half to kill a fellow, and a manly fellow.