because he was conscious that no form of woman would anywhere come of
them. Woman was married; she had the ring on her finger! He could at
his option look on her in the miniature, he could think of her as being
in the city where she had been painted; but he could not conjure her out
of space; she was nowhere in the ambient air. Secretly she was a feeling
that lay half slumbering very deep down within him, and he kept the
secret, choosing to be poor rather than call her forth. He was in truth
digesting with difficulty, as must be the case when it is allotted to the
brains to absorb what the soul abhors.

'Poor old Philip!' was his perpetual refrain. 'Philip, the girl you
loved is married; and here's her portrait taken in her last blush; and
the man who has her hasn't a share in that!' Thus, throwing in the ghost
of a sigh for sympathy, it seemed to Patrick that the intelligence would
have to be communicated. Bang is better, thought he, for bad news than
snapping fire and feinting, when you're bound half to kill a fellow, and
a manly fellow.

Determined that bang it should be, he hurried from the terminus to
Philip's hotel, where he had left him, and was thence despatched to the
house of Captain Con O'Donnell, where he created a joyful confusion,
slightly dashed with rigour on the part of the regnant lady; which is not
to be wondered at, considering that both the gentlemen attending her,
Philip and her husband, quitted her table with shouts at the announcement
of his name, and her husband hauled him in unwashed before her, crying
that the lost was found, the errant returned, the Prodigal Pat recovered
by his kinsman! and she had to submit to the introduction of the
disturber: and a bedchamber had to be thought of for the unexpected
guest, and the dinner to be delayed in middle course, and her husband
corrected between the discussions concerning the bedchamber, and either