Who spoke, and what they uttered at the repast, and his own remarks, he was unaware of.  He turned right and left a brilliant countenance that had the glitter of frost-light; it sparkled and was unreceptive.  No wonder Miss Adister deemed him wilder and stranger than ever.  She necessarily supposed the excess of his peculiarities to be an effect of the portrait, and would have had him, according to her ideas of a young man of some depth of feeling, dreamier.  On the contrary, he talked sheer commonplace.  He had ridden to the spur of the mountains, and had put up the mare, and groomed and fed her, not permitting another hand to touch her:  all very well, and his praises of the mare likewise, but he had not a syllable for the sublime of the mountains.  He might have careered over midland flats for any susceptibility that he betrayed to the grandeur of the scenery she loved.  Ultimately she fancied the miniature had been overlooked in his hurry to dress, and that he was now merely excited by his lively gallop to a certain degree of hard brightness noticeable in hunting men at their dinner.

The elixir in Patrick carried him higher than mountain crests.  Adiante illumined an expanded world for him, miraculous, yet the real one, only wanting such light to show its riches.  She lifted it out of darkness with swift throbs of her heavenliness as she swam to his eyelids, vanished and dazzled anew, and made these gleams of her and the dark intervals his dream of the winged earth on her flight from splendour to splendour, secresy to secresy;—­follow you that can, the youth whose heart is an opened mine, whose head is an irradiated sky, under the spell of imagined magical beauty.  She was bugle, banner, sunrise, of his inmost ambition and rapture.

And without a warning, she fled; her features were lost; his power of imagining them wrestled with vapour; the effort contracted his outlook.  But if she left him blind of her, she left him with no lessened bigness of heart.  He frankly believed in her revelation of a greater world and a livelier earth, a flying earth and a world wealthier than grouped history in heroic marvels:  he fell back on the exultation of his having seen her, and on the hope for the speedy coming of midnight, when the fountain of her in the miniature would be seen and drunk of at his full leisure, and his glorious elation of thrice man almost up to mounting spirit would be restored to make him worthy of the vision.

Meanwhile Caroline had withdrawn and the lord of Earlsfont was fretting at his theme.  He had decided not to be a party in the sale of either of his daughter’s estates:  let her choose other agents:  if the iniquity was committed, his hands would be clean of it.  Mr. Adister spoke by way of prelude to the sketch of ‘this prince’ whose title was a lurid delusion.  Patrick heard of a sexagenarian rake and Danube adventurer, in person a description of falcon-Caliban, containing his shagginess in a frogged