kley
Court. Nor was this mere spiritual longing; it had its material side. At
Beckley Court she could feel her foreign rank. Moving with our nobility
as an equal, she could feel that the short dazzling glitter of her career
was not illusory, and had left her something solid; not coin of the realm
exactly, but yet gold. She could not feel this in the Cogglesby saloons,
among pitiable bourgeoises--middle-class people daily soiled by the touch
of tradesmen. They dragged her down. Their very homage was a mockery.

Let the Countess have due credit for still allowing Evan to visit Beckley
Court to follow up his chance. If Demogorgon betrayed her there, the
Count was her protector: a woman rises to her husband. But a man is what
he is, and must stand upon that. She was positive Evan had committed
himself in some manner. As it did not suit her to think so, she at once
encouraged an imaginary conversation, in which she took the argument that
it was quite impossible Evan could have been so mad, and others instanced
his youth, his wrongheaded perversity, his ungenerous disregard for his
devoted sister, and his known weakness: she replying, that undoubtedly
they were right so far: but that he could not have said he himself was
that horrible thing, because he was nothing of the sort: which faith in
Evan's stedfast adherence to facts, ultimately silenced the phantom
opposition, and gained the day.

With admiration let us behold the Countess de Saldar alighting on the
gravel sweep of Beckley Court, the footman and butler of the enemy bowing
obsequious welcome to the most potent visitor Beckley Court has ever yet
embraced.

The despatches of a general being usually acknowledged to be the safest
sources from which the historian of a campaign can draw, I proceed to set
forth a letter of the Countess de Saldar, forwarded to her sister,
Harriet Cogglesby, three mornings after her arrival at Beckley Court; and
which, if it should prove false in a few particulars, does nevertheless
let us into the state of the Countess's mind, and gives the result of
that general's first inspection of the field of action. The Countess's
epistolary English does small credit to her Fallow field education; but
it is feminine, and flows more than her ordinary speech. Besides, leaders
of men have always notoriously been above the honours of grammar.
'MY DEAREST HARRIET,

'Your note awaited me. No sooner my name announced, than servitors in
yellow livery, with