Patrick accepted Adiante’s husband:  the man was her husband.  Hideous (for there was no combating her father’s painting of him), he was almost interesting through his alliance:—­an example of how much earth the worshipper can swallow when he is quite sincere.  Instead of his going under eclipse, the beauty of his lady eclipsed her monster.  He believed in her right to choose according to her pleasure since her lover was denied her.  Sitting alone by his fire, he gazed at her for hours and bled for Philip.  There was a riddle to be answered in her cutting herself away from Philip; he could not answer it; her face was the vindication and the grief.  The usual traverses besetting true lovers were suggested to him, enemies and slanders and intercepted letters.  He rejected them in the presence of the beautiful inscrutable.  Small marvel that Philip had loved her.  ‘Poor fellow’ Patrick cried aloud, and drooped on a fit of tears.

The sleep he had was urgently dream-ridden to goals that eluded him and broadened to fresh races and chases waving something to be won which never was won, albeit untiringly pursued amid a series of adventures, tragic episodes; wild enthusiasm.  The whole of it was featureless, a shifting agitation; yet he must have been endowed to extricate a particular meaning applied to himself out of the mass of tumbled events, and closely in relation to realities, for he quitted his bed passionately regretting that he had not gone through a course of drill and study of the military art.  He remembered Mr. Adister’s having said that military training was good for all gentlemen.

‘I could join the French Foreign Legion,’ he thought.

Adiante was as beautiful by day as by night.  He looked.  The riddle of her was more burdensome in the daylight.

He sighed, and on another surging of his admiration launched the resolve that he would serve her blindly, without one question.  How, when, where, and the means and the aim, he did not think of.  There was she, and here was he, and heaven and a great heart would show the way.

Adiante at eighteen, the full length of her, fresh in her love of Philip, was not the same person to him, she had not the same secret; she was beautiful differently.  By right he should have loved the portrait best:  but he had not seen it first; he had already lived through a life of emotions with the miniature, and could besides clasp the frame; and moreover he fondled an absurd notion that the miniature would be entrusted to him for a time, and was almost a possession.  The pain of the thought of relinquishing it was the origin of this foolishness.  And again, if it be fair to prove him so deeply, true to his brother though he was (admiration of a woman does thus influence the tides of our blood to render the noblest of us guilty of some unconscious wavering of our loyalty), Patrick dedicated the full-length of Adiante to Philip, and reserved the other, her face and neck, for himself.