broken. And I ready to glorify her for a saint! And now she must have
loved the man, or his title, to change her religion. She gives him her
soul! No praise to her for that: but mercy! what a love it must be.
Or else it's a spell. But wasn't she rather one for flinging spells than
melting? Except that we're all of us hit at last, and generally by our
own weapon. But she loved Philip: she loved him down to shipwreck and
drowning: she gave battle for him, and against her father; all the place
here and the country's alive with their meetings and partings:--she can't
have married! She wouldn't change her religion for her lover: how can
she have done it for this prince? Why, it's to swear false oaths!--
unless it's possible for a woman to slip out of herself and be another
person after a death like that of a love like hers.'

Patrick stopped: the idea demanded a scrutiny.

'She's another person for me,' he said. 'Here's the worst I ever
imagined of her!--thousands of miles and pits of sulphur beyond the
worst and the very worst! I thought her fickle, I thought her heartless,
rather a black fairy, perched above us, not quite among the stars of
heaven. I had my ideas. But never that she was a creature to jump
herself down into a gulf and be lost for ever. She's gone, extinguished
--there she is, under the penitent's hoodcap with eyeholes, before the
faggots! and that's what she has married!--a burning torment, and none
of the joys of martyrdom. Oh! I'm not awake. But I never dreamed of
such a thing as this--not the hard, bare, lump-of-earth-fact:--and that's
the only thing to tell me I'm not dreaming now.'

He subsided again; then deeply beseeching asked:

'Have you by chance a portrait of the gentleman, Miss Adister? Is there