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. Her lover, in the consideration of a real soul among the shifty
creatures, is her husband; and have we not the word of heaven directing
her to submit herself to him who is her husband before all others? That
peerless Adiante had previously erred in the upper sphere where she
received her condemnation, but such a sphere is ladder and ladder and
silver ladder high above your hair-splitting pates, you children of
earth, and it is not for you to act on the verdict in decrying her:
rather 'tis for you to raise hymns of worship to a saint.

Thus did the ingenious Patrick change his ground and gain his argument
with the celerity of one who wins a game by playing it without an
adversary. Mr. Adister had sprung a new sense in him on the subject of
the renunciation of the religion. No thought of a possible apostasy had
ever occurred to the youth, and as he was aware that the difference of
their faith had been the main cause of the division of Adiante and