‘I thought you were aware of my cousin’s marriage.’

‘Was I?’ said Patrick, asking it of himself, for his conscience would not acknowledge an absolute ignorance.  ’No:  I fought it, I wouldn’t have a blot on her be suspected.  She’s married!  She’s married to one of their princes!—­married for a title!—­and changed her religion!  And Miss Adister, you’re speaking of Adiante?’

‘My cousin Adiante.’

’Well did I hate the name!  I heard it first over in France.  Our people wrote to me of her; and it’s a name to set you thinking:  Is she tender, or nothing like a woman,—­a stone?  And I put it to my best friend there, Father Clement, who’s a scholar, up in everything, and he said it was a name with a pretty sound and an ill meaning—­far from tender; and a bad history too, for she was one of the forty-nine Danaides who killed their husbands for the sake of their father and was not likely to be the fiftieth, considering the name she bore.  It was for her father’s sake she as good as killed her lover, and the two Adiantes are like enough:  they’re as like as a pair of hands with daggers.  So that was my brother Philip’s luck!  She’s married!  It’s done; it’s over, like death:  no hope.  And this time it’s against her father; it’s against her faith.  There’s the end of Philip!  I could have prophesied it; I did; and when they broke, from her casting him off—­true to her name! thought I. She cast him off, and she couldn’t wait for him, and there’s his heart broken.  And I ready to glorify her for a saint!  And now she must have loved the man, or his title, to change her religion.  She gives him her soul!  No praise to her for that:  but mercy! what a love it must be.  Or else it’s a spell.  But wasn’t she rather one for flinging spells than melting?  Except that we’re all of us hit at last, and generally by our own weapon.  But she loved Philip:  she loved him down to shipwreck and drowning:  she gave battle for him, and against her father; all the place here and the country’s alive with their meetings and partings:—­she can’t have married!  She wouldn’t change her religion for her lover:  how can she have done it for this prince?  Why, it’s to swear false oaths!—­unless it’s possible for a woman to slip out of herself and be another person after a death like that of a love like hers.’

Patrick stopped:  the idea demanded a scrutiny.

‘She’s another person for me,’ he said.  ’Here’s the worst I ever imagined of her!—­thousands of miles and pits of sulphur beyond the worst and the very worst!  I thought her fickle, I thought her heartless, rather a black fairy, perched above us, not quite among the stars of heaven.  I had my ideas.  But never that she was a creature to jump herself down into a gulf and be lost for ever.  She’s gone, extinguished—­there she is, under the penitent’s hoodcap with eyeholes, before the faggots! and that’s what she has married!—­a burning torment, and none of the joys of martyrdom.  Oh!  I’m not awake.  But I never dreamed of such a thing as this—­not the hard, bare, lump-of-earth-fact:—­and that’s the only thing to tell me I’m not dreaming now.’