The business of the hour demanded more of her than a seeking for refreshment.  She had been invited to join the consultation of her uncle with his lawyer.  Mr. Adister tossed her another letter from Vienna, of that morning’s delivery.  She read it with composure.  It became her task to pay no heed to his loss of patience, and induce him to acquiesce in his legal adviser’s view which was, to temporise further, present an array of obstacles, and by all possible suggestions induce the princess to come over to England, where her father’s influence with her would have a chance of being established again; and it might then be hoped that she, who had never when under sharp temptation acted disobediently to his wishes at home, and who certainly would not have dreamed of contracting the abhorred alliance had she been breathing the air of common sense peculiar to her native land, would see the prudence, if not the solemn obligation, of retaining to herself these family possessions.  Caroline was urgent with her uncle to act on such good counsel.  She marvelled at his opposition, though she detected the principal basis of it.

Mr. Adister had no ground of opposition but his own intemperateness.  The Welsh grandmother’s legacy of her estates to his girl, overlooking her brothers, Colonel Arthur and Captain David, had excessively vexed him, despite the strong feeling he entertained for Adiante; and not simply because of the blow he received in it unexpectedly from that old lady, as the last and heaviest of the long and open feud between them, but also, chiefly, that it outraged and did permanent injury to his ideas of the proper balance of the sexes.  Between himself and Mrs. Winnion Rhys the condition of the balance had been a point of vehement disputation, she insisting to have it finer up to equality, and he that the naturally lighter scale should continue to kick the beam.  Behold now the consequence of the wilful Welshwoman’s insanest of legacies!  The estates were left to Adiante Adister for her sole use and benefit, making almost a man of her, and an unshackled man, owing no dues to posterity.  Those estates in the hands of a woman are in the hands of her husband; and the husband a gambler and a knave, they are in the hands of the Jews—­or gone to smoke.  Let them go.  A devilish malignity bequeathed them:  let them go back to their infernal origin.  And when they were gone, his girl would soon discover that there was no better place to come to than her home; she would come without an asking, and alone, and without much prospect of the intrusion of her infamous Hook-nose in pursuit of her at Earlsfont.  The money wasted, the wife would be at peace.  Here she would have leisure to repent of all the steps she had taken since that fatal one of the acceptance of the invitation to the Embassy at Vienna.  Mr. Adister had warned her both against her going and against the influence of her friend Lady Wenchester, our Ambassadress there, another Welsh woman, with the