She was sure the letter would go.  And there was not much to signify if it did.  But the curious fatality that a person of such a native uprightness as Mrs. Adister should have been drawn in among Irishmen, set her thoughts upon the composer of the letter, and upon the contrast of his ingenuous look with the powerful cast of his head.  She fancied a certain danger about him; of what kind she could not quite distinguish, for it had no reference to woman’s heart, and he was too young to be much of a politician, and he was not in the priesthood.  His transparency was of a totally different order from Captain Con’s, which proclaimed itself genuine by the inability to conceal a shoal of subterfuges.  The younger cousin’s features carried a something invisible behind them, and she was just perceptive enough to spy it, and it excited her suspicions.  Irishmen both she and her brother had to learn to like, owing to their bad repute for stability:  they are, moreover, Papists:  they are not given to ideas:  that one of the working for the future has not struck them.  In fine, they are not solid, not law-supporting, not disposed to be (humbly be it said) beneficent, like the good English.  These were her views, and as she held it a weakness to have to confess that Irishmen are socially more fascinating than the good English, she was on her guard against them.

Of course the letter had gone.  She heard of it before the commencement of the dinner, after Mrs. Adister had introduced Captain Philip O’Donnell to her, and while she was exchanging a word or two with Colonel Adister, who stood ready to conduct her to the table.  If he addressed any remarks to the lady under his charge, Miss Mattock did not hear him; and she listened—­who shall say why?  His unlike likeness to his brother had struck her.  Patrick opposite was flowing in speech.  But Captain Philip O’Donnell’s taciturnity seemed no uncivil gloom:  it wore nothing of that look of being beneath the table, which some of our good English are guilty of at their social festivities, or of towering aloof a Matterhorn above it, in the style of Colonel Adister.  Her discourse with the latter amused her passing reflections.  They started a subject, and he punctuated her observations, or she his, and so they speedily ran to earth.

‘I think,’ says she, ‘you were in Egypt this time last winter.’

He supplies her with a comma:  ‘Rather later.’

Then he carries on the line.  ’Dull enough, if you don’t have the right sort of travelling crew in your boat.’

‘Naturally,’ she puts her semicolon, ominous of the full stop.

‘I fancy you have never been in Egypt?’

‘No’

There it is; for the tone betrays no curiosity about Egypt and her Nile, and he is led to suppose that she has a distaste for foreign places.

Condescending to attempt to please, which he has reason to wish to succeed in doing, the task of pursuing conversational intercourse devolves upon him—­