unshine of her breast, that it attracted the _bienveillance_ even of
those who had not taste or judgment to define the charm. Her open
natural manner, blending the frankness of the Scotch with the polished
reserve of the English woman, her total exemption from vanity,
calculated alike to please others and maintain her own cheerfulness
undimmed by a single cloud.

Lady Audley felt for her niece a sentiment which she mistook for
affection; her self-approbation was gratified at the contemplation of a
being who owed every advantage to her, and whom she had rescued from the
coarseness and vulgarity which she deemed inseparable from the manners
of every Scotchwoman. If Lady Audley really loved any human being it was
her son. In him were centred her dearest interests; on his
aggrandisement and future importance hung her most sanguine hopes. She
had acted contrary to the advice of her male relations, and followed her
own judgment, by giving her son a private education. He was brought up
under her own eye by a tutor of deep erudition, but who was totally
unfitted for forming the mind, and compensating for those advantages
which may be derived from a public education. The circumstances of his
education, however, combined rather to stifle the exposure than to
destroy the existence of some very dangerous qualities that seemed
inherent in Sir Edmund's nature. He was ardent, impetuous, and
passionate, though these propensities were cloaked by a reserve, partly
natural, and partly arising from of his mother and tutor.

His was not the effervescence of character which bursts forth on every
trivial occasion; but when any powerful cause awakened the slumbering
inmates, of his breast, they blazed with an uncontrolled fury that
defied all opposition, and overleaped all bounds of reason and decorum.

Experience often shows us that minds formed of the most opposite
attributes more forcibly attract each other than those which appear cast
in the same mould. The source of this fascination is difficult to trace;
it possesses not reason for its basis, yet it is perhaps the more
tyrannical in its influence from that very cause. The weakness of our
natures occasionally makes us feel a potent charm in "errors of a noble
mind."

Sir Edmund Audley and Alicia Malcolm proved examples of this
observation. The affection of childhood had so gradually ripened into a
warmer sentiment, that neither was conscious of the nature of that
sentiment till after