She took the letter, wondering a little that it should be in Captain Con’s handwriting.

‘I am to read it through?’ she said, after a run over some lines.

He nodded.  She thought it a sign of his friendliness in sharing family secrets with her, and read: 

’My dear Philip,—­Not a word of these contents, which will be delivered seasonably to the lady chiefly concerned, by the proper person.  She hears this morning I ’m off on a hasty visit to Ireland, as I have been preparing her of late to expect I must, and yours the blame, if any, though I will be the last to fling it at you.  I meet Father B. and pretty Kitty before I cross.  Judging by the wind this morning, the passage will furnish good schooling for a spell of the hustings.  But if I am in the nature of things unable to command the waves, trust me for holding a mob in leash; and they are tolerably alike.  My spirits are up.  Now the die is cast.  My election to the vacancy must be reckoned beforehand.  I promise you a sounding report from the Kincora Herald.  They will not say of me after that (and read only the speeches reported in the local paper) “what is the man but an Irish adventurer!” He is a lover of his country, Philip O’Donnell, and one of millions, we will hope.  And that stigmatic title of long standing, more than anything earthly, drove him to the step-to the ruin of his domestic felicity perhaps.  But we are past sighing.

’Think you, when he crossed the tide, Caius Julius Caesar sighed?

’No, nor thought of his life, nor his wife, but of the thing to be done.  Laugh, my boy!  I know what I am about when I set my mind on a powerful example.  As the chameleon gets his colour, we get our character from the objects we contemplate . . .’

Jane glanced over the edge of the letter sheet rosily at Philip.

His dryness in hitting the laughable point diverted her, and her mind became suffused with a series of pictures of the chameleon captain planted in view of the Roman to become a copy of him, so that she did not peruse the terminating lines with her wakefullest attention: 

’The liege lady of my heart will be the earliest to hail her hero triumphant, or cherish him beaten—­which is not in the prospect.  Let Ireland be true to Ireland.  We will talk of the consolidation of the Union by and by.  You are for that, you say, when certain things are done; and you are where I leave you, on the highway, though seeming to go at a funeral pace to certain ceremonies leading to the union of the two countries in the solidest fashion, to their mutual benefit, after a shining example.  Con sleeps with a corner of the eye open, and you are not the only soldier who is a strategist, and a tactician too, aware of when it is best to be out of the way.  Now adieu and pax vobiscum.  Reap the rich harvest of your fall to earth.  I leave you in the charge of the kindest of nurses,