Her mind was on her brother Edward, and she could not look sweet-oily, as her husband wooed her to do, with impulse to act the thing he was imagining.

’And there is to-morrow’s dinner-party to the Mattocks:  I cannot travel to Earlsfont,’ she said.

’Patrick is a disengaged young verderer, and knows the route, and has a welcome face there, and he might go, if you’re for having it performed by word of mouth.  But, trust me, my dear, bad news is best communicated by telegraph, which gives us no stupid articles and particles to quarrel with.  “Boy born Vienna doctor smiling nurse laughing.”  That tells it all, straight to the understanding, without any sickly circumlocutory stuff; and there’s nothing more offensive to us when we’re hurt at intelligence.  For the same reason, Colonel Arthur couldn’t go, since you’ll want him to meet the Mattocks?’

Captain Con’s underlip shone with a roguish thinness.

‘Arthur must be here,’ said Mrs. Adister.  ’I cannot bring myself to write it.  I disapprove of telegrams.’

She was asking to be assisted, so her husband said: 

’Take Patrick for a secretary.  Dictate.  He has a bold free hand and’ll supply all the fiorituri and arabesques necessary to the occasion running.’

She gazed at Patrick as if to intimate that he might be enlisted, and said:  ‘It will be to Caroline.  She will break it to her uncle.’

’Right, madam, on the part of a lady I ’ve never known to be wrong!  And so, my dear, I must take leave of you, to hurry down to the tormented intestines of that poor racked city, where the winds of panic are violently engaged in occupying the vacuum created by knocking over what the disaster left standing; and it ’ll much resemble a colliery accident there, I suspect, and a rescue of dead bodies.  Adieu, my dear.’  He pressed his lips on her thin fingers.

Patrick placed himself at Mrs. Adister’s disposal as her secretary.  She nodded a gracious acceptance of him.

’I recommended the telegraph because it’s my wife’s own style, and comes better from wires,’ said the captain, as they were putting on their overcoats in the hall.  ’You must know the family.  “Deeds not words” would serve for their motto.  She hates writing, and doesn’t much love talking.  Pat ’ll lengthen her sentences for her.  She’s fond of Adiante, and she sympathises with her brother Edward made a grandfather through the instrumentality of that foreign hooknose; and Patrick must turn the two dagger sentiments to a sort of love-knot and there’s the task he’ll have to work out in his letter to Miss Caroline.  It’s fun about Colonel Arthur not going.  He’s to meet the burning Miss Mattock, who has gold on her crown and a lot on her treasury, Phil, my boy! but I’m bound in honour not to propose it.  And a nice girl, a prize; afresh healthy girl; and brains:  the very girl!  But she’s jotted down for the Adisters, if Colonel Arthur can