’Yes, Captain Con always amuses me, and I am bound to confess I have no positive disrelish of his compliments.  But this may prove a desperate step.  The secret of his happiness is in extreme jeopardy.  Nothing would stop him, I suppose?’

Philip signified that it was too late.  He was moreover of opinion, and stated it in his briefest, that it would be advisable to leave the unfolding of the present secret to the captain.

Jane wondered why the letter had been shown.  Her patient might be annoyed and needing sympathy?

‘After all,’ she said, ’Captain Con may turn out to be a very good sort of member of Parliament in his way.’

Philip’s eyebrows lifted, and he let fall a breath, eloquent of his thoughts.

’My brother says he is a serviceable director of the Company they are associated in.’

‘He finds himself among reasonable men, and he is a chameleon.’

‘Parliament may steady him.’

‘It is too much of a platform for Con’s head.’

‘Yes, there is more of poet than politician,’ said she.  ’That is a danger.  But he calls himself our friend; I think he really has a liking for John and me.’

‘For you he has a real love,’ said Philip.

’Well, then, he may listen to us at times; he may be trusted not to wound us.  I am unmitigatedly for the one country—­no divisions.  We want all our strength in these days of monstrous armies directed by banditti Councils.  England is the nation of the Christian example to nations.  Oh! surely it is her aim.  At least she strives to be that.  I think it, and I see the many faults we have.’

Her patient’s eyelids were down.

She proposed to send her name up to Mrs. Adister.

On her return from the poor lady racked with headache and lying little conscious of her husband’s powder-barrel under the bed, Jane found her patient being worried by his official nurse, a farm-labourer’s wife, a bundle of a woman, whose lumbering assiduities he fenced with reiterated humourous negatives to every one of her propositions, until she prefaced the last two or three of the list with a ‘Deary me!’ addressed consolatorily to herself.  She went through the same forms each day, at the usual hours of the day, and Jane, though she would have felt the apathetic doltishness of the woman less, felt how hard it must be for him to bear.

‘Your sister will be with you soon,’ she said.  ’I am glad, and yet I hope you will not allow her to put me aside altogether?’

‘You shall do as you wish,’ said Philip.

‘Is she like Patrick?  Her name is Kathleen, I know.’

‘She is a raw Irish girl, of good Irish training, but Irish.’

‘I hope she will be pleased with England.  Like Patrick in face, I mean.’

‘We think her a good-looking girl.’

‘Does she play? sing?’

‘Some of our ballads.’

‘She will delight my brother.  John loves Irish ballads.’