to have been down beside her at midnight.  She’s the worthiest woman alive, and I don’t shirk my duty.  Be quiet!’ he bellowed at the alarum; ’I ‘m coming.  Don’t be in such a fright, my dear,’ he admonished it as his wife, politely.  ’Your hand’ll take an hour to warm if you keep it out on the spring that sets the creature going.’  He turned and informed his company:  ’Her hand’ll take an hour to warm.  Dear! how she runs ahead:  d’ ye hear?  That’s the female tongue, and once off it won’t stop.  And this contrivance for fetching me from my tower to her bed was my own suggestion, in a fit of generosity!  Ireland all over!  I must hurry and wash my hair, for she can’t bear a perfume to kill a stink; she carries her charitable heart that far.  Good-night, I’ll be thinking of ye while I’m warming her.  Sit still, I can’t wait; ‘tis the secret of my happiness.’  He fled.  Patrick struck his knee on hearing the expected ballad-burden recur.

CHAPTER X

THE BROTHERS

‘Con has learnt one secret,’ said Philip, quitting his chair.

Patrick went up to him, and, ‘Give us a hug,’ he said, and the hug was given.

They were of an equal height, tall young men, alert, nervously braced from head to foot, with the differences between soldier and civilian marked by the succintly military bearing of the elder brother, whose movements were precise and prompt, and whose frame was leopardlike in indolence.  Beside him Patrick seemed cubbish, though beside another he would not have appeared so.  His features were not so brilliantly regular, but were a fanciful sketch of the same design, showing a wider pattern of the long square head and the forehead, a wavering at the dip of the nose, livelier nostrils:  the nostrils dilated and contracted, and were exceeding alive.  His eyelids had to do with the look of his eyes, and were often seen cutting the ball.  Philip’s eyes were large on the pent of his brows, open, liquid, and quick with the fire in him.  Eyes of that quality are the visible mind, animated both to speak it and to render it what comes within their scope.  They were full, unshaded direct, the man himself, in action.  Patrick’s mouth had to be studied for an additional index to the character.  To symbolise them, they were as a sword-blade lying beside book.

Men would have thought Patrick the slippery one of the two:  women would have inclined to confide in him the more thoroughly; they bring feeling to the test, and do not so much read a print as read the imprinting on themselves; and the report that a certain one of us is true as steel, must be unanimous at a propitious hour to assure them completely that the steel is not two-edged in the fully formed nature of a man whom they have not tried.  They are more at home with the unformed, which lends itself to feeling and imagination.  Besides Patrick came nearer to them; he showed sensibility.  They have it, and they deem it auspicious of goodness, or of the gentleness acceptable as an equivalent.  Not the less was Philip the one to inspire the deeper and the wilder passion.