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Meanwhile Caroline had withdrawn and the lord of Earlsfont was fretting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