Priming his kinsman thus up to the door of the diningroom, Captain Con thrust him in.

Mistress Adister O’Donnell’s head rounded as by slow attraction to the clock.  Her disciplined husband signified an equal mixture of contrition and astonishment at the passing of time.  He fell to work upon his plate in obedience to the immediate policy dictated to him.

The unbending English lady contrasted with her husband so signally that the oddly united couple appeared yoked in a common harness for a perpetual display of the opposition of the races.  She resembled her brother, the lord of Earlsfont, in her remarkable height and her calm air of authority and self-sustainment.  From beneath a head-dress built of white curls and costly lace, half enclosing her high narrow forehead, a pale, thin, straight bridge of nose descended prominently over her sunken cheeks to thin locked lips.  Her aspect suggested the repose of a winter landscape, enjoyable in pictures, or on skates, otherwise nipping. . . .  Mental directness, of no greater breadth than her principal feature, was the character it expressed; and candour of spirit shone through the transparency she was, if that mild taper could be said to shine in proof of a vitality rarely notified to the outer world by the opening of her mouth; chiefly then, though not malevolently to command:  as the portal of some snow-bound monastery opens to the outcast, bidding it be known that the light across the wolds was not deceptive and a glimmer of light subsists among the silent within.  The life sufficed to her.  She was like a marble effigy seated upright, requiring but to be laid at her length for transport to the cover of the tomb.

Now Captain Con was by nature ruddy as an Indian summer flushed in all its leaves.  The corners of his face had everywhere a frank ambush, or child’s hiding-place, for languages and laughter.  He could worm with a smile quite his own the humour out of men possessing any; and even under rigorous law, and it could not be disputed that there was rigour in the beneficent laws imposed upon him by his wife, his genius for humour and passion for sly independence came up and curled away like the smoke of the illicit still, wherein the fanciful discern fine sprites indulging in luxurious grimaces at a government long-nosed to no purpose.  Perhaps, as Patrick said of him to Caroline Adister, he was a bard without a theme.  He certainly was a man of speech, and the having fearfully to contain himself for the greater number of the hours of the day, for the preservation of the domestic felicity he had learnt to value, fathered the sentiment of revolt in his bosom.

By this time, long after five minutes had elapsed, the frost presiding at the table was fast withering Captain Con; and he was irritable to hear why Patrick had gone off to Earlsfont, and what he had done there, and the adventures he had tasted on the road; anything for warmth.  His efforts to fish the word out of Patrick produced deeper crevasses in the conversation, and he cried to himself:  Hats and crape-bands! mightily struck by an idea that he and his cousins were a party of hired mourners over the meat they consumed.  Patrick was endeavouring to spare his brother a mention of Earlsfont before they had private talk together.  He answered neither to a dip of the hook nor to a pull.