‘Then, you are no Jesuit?’ he was asked.

Thinking it scarcely required a response, he shrugged.

‘You would not change your religion, sir?’ said Mr. Adister in seeming anger.

Patrick thought he would have to rise:  he half fancied himself summoned to change his religion or depart from the house.

‘Not I,’ said he.

‘Not for the title of Prince?’ he was further pressed, and he replied: 

‘I don’t happen to have an ambition for the title of Prince.’

‘Or any title!’ interjected Mr. Adister, ’or whatever the devil can offer!—­or,’ he spoke more pointedly, ’for what fools call a brilliant marriage?’

‘My religion?’ Patrick now treated the question seriously and raised his head:  ‘I’d not suffer myself to be asked twice.’

The sceptical northern-blue eyes of his host dwelt on him with their full repellent stare.

The young Catholic gentleman expected he might hear a frenetic zealot roar out:  Be off!

He was not immediately reassured by the words ’Dead or alive, then, you have a father!’

The spectacle of a state of excitement without a show of feeling was novel to Patrick.  He began to see that he was not implicated in a wrath that referred to some great offender, and Mr. Adister soon confirmed his view by saying:  ‘You are no disgrace to your begetting, sir!’

With that he quitted his chair, and hospitably proposed to conduct his guest over the house and grounds.

CHAPTER III

CAROLINE

Men of the Adister family having taken to themselves brides of a very dusty pedigree from the Principality, there were curious rough heirlooms to be seen about the house, shields on the armoury walls and hunting-horns, and drinking-horns, and spears, and chain-belts bearing clasps of heads of beasts; old gold ornaments, torques, blue-stone necklaces, under glass-cases, were in the library; huge rings that must have given the wearers fearful fists; a shirt of coarse linen with a pale brown spot on the breast, like a fallen beech-leaf; and many sealed parchment-skins, very precious, for an inspection of which, as Patrick was bidden to understand, History humbly knocked at the Earlsfont hall-doors; and the proud muse made her transcripts of them kneeling.  He would have been affected by these wonders had any relic of Adiante appeased his thirst.  Or had there been one mention of her, it would have disengaged him from the incessant speculations regarding the daughter of the house, of whom not a word was uttered.  No portrait of her was shown.  Why was she absent from her home so long? where was she?  How could her name be started?  And was it she who was the sinner in her father’s mind?  But the idolatrous love between Adiante and her father was once a legend:  they could not have been cut asunder.  She had offered up her love of Philip as a sacrifice