hussar-jacket and crimson pantaloons, with hook-nose, fox-eyes, grizzled billow of frowsy moustache, and chin of a beast of prey.  This fellow, habitually one of the dogs lining the green tables of the foreign Baths, snapping for gold all day and half the night, to spend their winnings in debauchery and howl threats of suicide, never fulfilled early enough, when they lost, claimed his princedom on the strength of his father’s murder of a reigning prince and sitting in his place for six months, till a merited shot from another pretender sent him to his account.  ’What do you say to such a nest of assassins, and one of them, an outcast and blackleg, asking an English gentleman to acknowledge him as a member of his family!  I have,’ said Mr. Adister, ’direct information that this gibbet-bird is conspiring to dethrone—­they call it—­the present reigning prince, and the proceeds of my daughter’s estates are, by her desire—­if she has not written under compulsion of the scoundrel—­intended to speed their blood-mongering.  There goes a Welshwoman’s legacy to the sea, with a herd of swine with devils in them!’

Mr. Camminy kept his head bent, his hand on his glass of port.  Patrick stared, and the working of his troubled brows gave the unhappy gentleman such lean comfort as he was capable of taking.  Patrick in sooth was engaged in the hard attempt at the same time to do two of the most difficult things which can be proposed to the ingenuity of sensational youth:  he was trying to excuse a respected senior for conduct that he could not approve, while he did inward battle to reconcile his feelings with the frightful addition to his hoard of knowledge:  in other words, he sought strenuously to mix the sketch of the prince with the dregs of the elixir coming from the portrait of Adiante; and now she sank into obscurity behind the blackest of brushes, representing her incredible husband; and now by force of some natural light she broke through the ugly mist and gave her adored the sweet lines and colours of the features he had lost.  There was an ebb and flow of the struggle, until, able to say to himself that he saw her clearly as though the portrait was in the palm of his hand, the battle of the imagination ceased and she was fairer for him than if her foot had continued pure of its erratic step:  fairer, owing to the eyes he saw with; he had shaken himself free of the exacting senses which consent to the worship of women upon the condition of their possessing all the precious and the miraculous qualities; among others, the gift of an exquisite fragility that cannot break; in short, upon terms flattering to the individual devotee.  Without knowing it he had done it and got some of the upholding strength of those noblest of honest men who not merely give souls to women—­an extraordinary endowment of them—­but also discourse to them with their souls.