What if she had done it, upon a review of her treatment of her lover, and gone into a convent to wait for Philip to come and claim her?—­saying, ’Philip, I’ve put the knife to my father’s love of me; love me double’; and so she just half swoons, enough to show how the dear angel looks in her sleep:  a trick of kindness these heavenly women have, that we heathen may get a peep of their secret rose-enfolded selves; and dream ’s no word, nor drunken, for the blessed mischief it works with us.

Supposing it so, it accounted for everything:  for her absence, and her father’s abstention from a mention of her, and the pretty good sort of welcome Patrick had received; for as yet it was unknown that she did it all for an O’Donnell.

These being his reflections, he at once accepted a view of her that so agreeably quieted his perplexity, and he leapt out of his tangle into the happy open spaces where the romantic things of life are as natural as the sun that rises and sets.  There you imagine what you will; you live what you imagine.  An Adiante meets her lover another Adiante, the phantom likeness of her, similar to the finger-tips, hovers to a meeting with some one whose heart shakes your manful frame at but a thought of it.  But this other Adiante is altogether a secondary conception, barely descried, and chased by you that she may interpret the mystical nature of the happiness of those two, close-linked to eternity, in advance.  You would learn it, if she would expound it; you are ready to learn it, for the sake of knowledge; and if you link yourself to her and do as those two are doing, it is chiefly in a spirit of imitation, in sympathy with the darting couple ahead . . . .

Meanwhile he conversed, and seemed, to a gentleman unaware of the vaporous activities of his brain, a young fellow of a certain practical sense.

‘We have not much to teach you in:  horseflesh,’ Mr. Adister said, quitting the stables to proceed to the gardens.

‘We must look alive to keep up our breed, sir,’ said Patrick.  ’We’re breeding too fine:  and soon we shan’t be able to horse our troopers.  I call that the land for horses where the cavalry’s well-mounted on a native breed.’

‘You have your brother’s notions of cavalry, have you!’

’I leave it to Philip to boast what cavalry can do on the field.  He knows:  but he knows that troopers must be mounted:  and we’re fineing more and more from bone:  with the sales to foreigners! and the only chance of their not beating us is that they’ll be so good as follow our bad example.  Prussia’s well horsed, and for the work it’s intended to do, the Austrian light cavalry’s a model.  So I’m told.  I’ll see for myself.  Then we sit our horses too heavy.  The Saxon trooper runs headlong to flesh.  ’Tis the beer that fattens and swells him.  Properly to speak, we’ve no light cavalry.  The French are studying it, and when they take to studying, they come to the fore.  I’ll pay a visit to their breeding establishments.  We’ve no studying here, and not a scrap of system that I see.  All the country seems armed for bullying the facts, till the periodical panic arrives, and then it ’s for lying flat and roaring—­ and we’ll drop the curtain, if you please.’