to her as one of the errors of her strong mind, that she believed friendship practicable between men and women, young or old.  She knew the world pretty well, and was not amazed by extraordinary accidents; but as she herself continued to be an example of her faith:  we must presume it natural that her delusion should cling to her.  She welcomed Evan as her daughter’s friend, walked half-way across the room to meet him on his introduction to her, and with the simple words, ‘I have heard of you,’ let him see that he stood upon his merits in her house.  The young man’s spirit caught something of hers even in their first interview, and at once mounted to that level.  Unconsciously he felt that she took, and would take him, for what he was, and he rose to his worth in the society she presided over.  A youth like Evan could not perceive, that in loving this lady’s daughter, and accepting the place she offered him, he was guilty of a breach of confidence; or reflect, that her entire absence of suspicion imposed upon him a corresponding honesty toward her.  He fell into a blindness.  Without dreaming for a moment that she designed to encourage his passion for Rose, he yet beheld himself in the light she had cast on him; and, received as her daughter’s friend, it seemed to him not so utterly monstrous that he might be her daughter’s lover.  A haughty, a grand, or a too familiar manner, would have kept his eyes clearer on his true condition.  Lady Jocelyn spoke to his secret nature, and eclipsed in his mind the outward aspects with which it was warring.  To her he was a gallant young man, a fit companion for Rose, and when she and Sir Franks said, and showed him, that they were glad to know him, his heart swam in a flood of happiness they little suspected.

This was another of the many forms of intoxication to which circumstances subjected the poor lover.  In Fallow field, among impertinent young men, Evan’s pride proclaimed him a tailor.  At Beckley Court, acted on by one genuine soul, he forgot it, and felt elate in his manhood.  The shades of Tailordom dispersed like fog before the full South-west breeze.  When I say he forgot it, the fact was present enough to him, but it became an outward fact:  he had ceased to feel it within him.  It was not a portion of his being, hard as Mrs. Mel had struck to fix it.  Consequently, though he was in a far worse plight than when he parted with Rose on board the Jocasta, he felt much less of an impostor now.  This may have been partly because he had endured his struggle with the Demogorgon the Countess painted to him in such frightful colours, and found him human after all; but it was mainly owing to the hearty welcome Lady Jocelyn had extended to him as the friend of Rose.