’So the doctor thinks his patient is doing favourably!  And you cottoned to Patrick?  And I don’t wonder.  Where was it?’

’We met in Trieste.  He was about to start by one of the Austrian boats for the East.’

‘Not disturbed! no! with a rotten potato inside it paralysing digestion!’ exclaimed Con.  ‘Now Patrick had been having a peep at Vienna, hadn’t he?’

’He had; he was fresh from Vienna when I met him.  As to Ireland, the harvest was only middling good last year.’

’And that’s the bit of luck we depend on.  A cloud too much, and it’s drowned!  Had he seen, do you know, anybody in Vienna?—­you were not long together at Trieste?’

Mr. Colesworth had sufficient quickness to perceive that the two questions could be answered as one, and saying:  ‘He was disappointed,’ revealed that he and Patrick had been long enough together to come to terms of intimacy.

‘To be sure, he gave you a letter of introduction to his family!’ said Con.  ’And permit me to add, that Patrick’s choice of a friend is mine on trust.  The lady he was for seeing, Mr. Colesworth, was just then embarking on an adventure of a romantic character, particularly well suited to her nature, and the end of it was a trifle sanguinary, and she suffered a disappointment also, though not perhaps on that account.’

‘I heard of it in England last year,’ said Mr. Colesworth.  ’Did she come through it safely?’

’Without any personal disfigurement:  and is in England now, under her father’s roof, meditating fresh adventures.’

Kathleen cried:  ’Ye ’re talking of the lady who was Miss Adister—­I can guess—­Ah!’ She humped her shoulders and sent a shudder up her neck.

‘But she’s a grand creature, Mr. Colesworth, and you ought to know her,’ said Con.  ’That is, if you’d like to have an idea of a young Catherine or a Semiramisminus an army and a country.  There’s nothing she’s not capable of aiming at.  And there’s pretty well nothing and nobody she wouldn’t make use of.  She has great notions of the power of the British Press and the British purse—­each in turn as a key to the other.  Now for an egg, Kathleen.’

‘I think I’ll eat an egg,’ Kathleen replied.

’Bless the honey heart of the girl!  Life’s in you, my dear, and calls for fuel.  I’m glad to see that Mr. Colesworth too can take a sight at the Sea-God after a night of him.  It augurs magnificently for a future career.  And let me tell you that the Pen demands it of us.  The first of the requisites is a stout stomach—­before a furnished head!  I’d not pass a man to be anything of a writer who couldn’t step ashore from a tempest and consume his Titan breakfast.’

‘We are qualifying for the literary craft, Miss O’Donnell,’ said Mr. Colesworth.

’It’s for a walk in the wind up Caer Gybi, and along the coast I mean to go,’ said Kathleen.

‘This morning?’ the captain asked her.