first loves not that they
are dearer to us,--quit that delusion: our ripened loves and mature
ambitions are probably closest to our hearts, as they deserve to be--but
we return to them because our youth has a hold on us which it asserts
whenever a disappointment knocks us down. Our old loves (with the bad
natures I know in them) are always lurking to avenge themselves on the
new by tempting us to a little retrograde infidelity. A schoolgirl in
Fallow field, the tailor's daughter, had sighed for the bliss of Beckley
Court. Beckley Court was her Elysium ere the ardent feminine brain
conceived a loftier summit. Fallen from that attained eminence, she
sighed anew for Beckley 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 for