‘My religion?’ Patrick now treated the question seriously and raised his head:  ‘I’d not suffer myself to be asked twice.’

The sceptical northern-blue eyes of his host dwelt on him with their full repellent stare.

The young Catholic gentleman expected he might hear a frenetic zealot roar out:  Be off!

He was not immediately reassured by the words ’Dead or alive, then, you have a father!’

The spectacle of a state of excitement without a show of feeling was novel to Patrick.  He began to see that he was not implicated in a wrath that referred to some great offender, and Mr. Adister soon confirmed his view by saying:  ‘You are no disgrace to your begetting, sir!’

With that he quitted his chair, and hospitably proposed to conduct his guest over the house and grounds.

CHAPTER III

CAROLINE

Men of the Adister family having taken to themselves brides of a very dusty pedigree from the Principality, there were curious rough heirlooms to be seen about the house, shields on the armoury walls and hunting-horns, and drinking-horns, and spears, and chain-belts bearing clasps of heads of beasts; old gold ornaments, torques, blue-stone necklaces, under glass-cases, were in the library; huge rings that must have given the wearers fearful fists; a shirt of coarse linen with a pale brown spot on the breast, like a fallen beech-leaf; and many sealed parchment-skins, very precious, for an inspection of which, as Patrick was bidden to understand, History humbly knocked at the Earlsfont hall-doors; and the proud muse made her transcripts of them kneeling.  He would have been affected by these wonders had any relic of Adiante appeased his thirst.  Or had there been one mention of her, it would have disengaged him from the incessant speculations regarding the daughter of the house, of whom not a word was uttered.  No portrait of her was shown.  Why was she absent from her home so long? where was she?  How could her name be started?  And was it she who was the sinner in her father’s mind?  But the idolatrous love between Adiante and her father was once a legend:  they could not have been cut asunder.  She had offered up her love of Philip as a sacrifice to it:  Patrick recollected that, and now with a softer gloom on his brooding he released her from the burden of his grand charge of unfaithfulness to the truest of lovers, by acknowledging that he was in the presence of the sole rival of his brother.  Glorious girl that she was, her betrayal of Philip had nothing of a woman’s base caprice to make it infamous:  she had sacrificed him to her reading of duty; and that was duty to her father; and the point of duty was in this instance rather a sacred one.  He heard voices murmur that she might be praised.  He remonstrated with them, assuring them, as one who knew, that a woman’s first duty is her duty to her lover; her parents are her second thought.