He answered with the half-smile that refers these questions to the settled fact.  Air had always brought him round; now he could feel he was embarked for recovery:  and he told her how the farmer and one of his men had lent a shoulder to present him to his old and surest physician—­rather like a crippled ghost.  M. Adister was upstairs in bed with one of her headaches.  Captain Con, then, was attending her, Jane supposed:  She spoke of him as the most devoted of husbands.

A slight hardening of Philip’s brows, well-known to her by this time, caused her to interrogate his eyes.  They were fixed on her in his manner of gazing with strong directness.  She read the contrary opinion, and some hieroglyphic matter besides.

‘We all respect him for his single-hearted care of her,’ she said.  ’I have a great liking for him.  His tirades about the Saxon tyrant are not worth mentioning, they mean nothing.  He would be one of the first to rush to the standard if there were danger; I know he would.  He is truly chivalrous, I am sure.’

Philip’s broad look at her had not swerved.  The bowl of primroses placed beside him on a chair by the farmer’s dame diverted it for a moment.

‘You gathered them?’ he said.

Jane drank his look at the flowers.

‘Yes, on my way,’ she replied.  ’We can none of us live for ever; and fresh water every day will keep them alive a good long time.  They had it from the clouds yesterday.  Do they not seem a bath of country happiness!’ Evidently they did their service in pleasing him.

Seeing his fingers grope on the rug, she handed him his open letters.

He selected the second, passing under his inspection, and asked her to read it.

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.