’Captain Con is constitutionally discontented because he’s a bard by nature, and without the right theme for his harp,’ said Patrick.  ’He has a notion of Erin as the unwilling bride of Mr. Bull, because her lord is not off in heroics enough to please her, and neglects her, and won’t let her be mistress of her own household, and she can’t forget that he once had the bad trick of beating her:  she sees the marks.  And you mayn’t believe it, but the Captain’s temper is to praise and exalt.  It is.  Irony in him is only eulogy standing on its head:  a sort of an upside down; a perversion:  that’s our view of him at home.  All he desires is to have us on the march, and he’d be perfectly happy marching, never mind the banner, though a bit of green in it would put him in tune, of course.  The banner of the Cid was green, Miss Adister:  or else it’s his pennon that was.  And there’s a quantity of our blood in Spain too.  We’ve watered many lands.’

The poor young English lady’s brain started wildly on the effort to be with him, and to understand whether she listened to humour or emotion:  she reposed herself as well as she could in the contemplation of an electrically-flashing maze, where every line ran losing itself in another.

He added:  ‘Old Philip!’ in a visible throb of pity for his brother; after the scrupulous dubitation between the banner and the pennon of the Cid!

It would have comforted her to laugh.  She was closer upon tears, and without any reason for them in her heart.

Such a position brings the hesitancy which says that the sitting is at an end.

She feared, as she laid aside her music-books, that there would be more to come about Adiante, but he spared her.  He bowed to her departing, and strolled off by himself.

CHAPTER VI

A CONSULTATION:  WITH OPINIONS UPON WELSHWOMEN AND THE CAMBRIAN RACE

Later in the day she heard that he was out scouring the country on one of her uncle’s horses.  She had too many distressing matters to think of for so singular a young man to have any other place than that which is given to the fantastical in a troubled and serious mind.  He danced there like the whimsy sunbeam of a shaken water below.  What would be his opinion of Adiante if he knew of her determination to sell the two fair estates she inherited from a grandmother whom she had venerated; that she might furnish arms to her husband to carry out an audacious enterprise likely to involve both of them in blood and ruin?  Would he not bound up aloft and quiver still more wildly?  She respected, quaint though it was, his imaginative heat of feeling for Adiante sufficiently to associate him with her so far; and she lent him in fancy her own bewilderment and grief at her cousin’s conduct, for the soothing that his exaggeration of them afforded her.  She could almost hear his outcry.