“You there, Virginius? I had not seen you.”
“Yes, Genius, I am here,” he answered slowly, but his face was turned toward the mountains.
“Virginius is always there,” continued the dark spirit. “But tell us how you come to be here. I saw the star, but scarcely reckoned it was yours.”
“Well, the story is long and uninteresting. But to be brief and enclose much in a nutshell, I have come to remove a curse.”
“Pooh! An impossibility. Bah! An idle dream.”
“That is exactly my own opinion. I am no good at removing curses. Besides, the family is particularly unlucky.”
“Indeed!”
“Yes. It has a descent, I am told, from the coming of the first Pretender, and is part Scotch, part Irish, and part English.”
“And in what does its ill-luck consist?” Plucritus had changed his position. He was leaning forward, apparently examining and playing with his ring.
“A few uninteresting sins, I believe. Debts contracted by ancestors descended upon children. You know it, the Catechism explains it.”