with rapture, and by Mary with the tenderest emotion. Lord Courtland was
always glad of an addition to the family party; and even Lady Juliana
experienced something like emotion as she beheld her son, now the exact
image of what his father had been twenty years before.

Edward Douglas was indeed a perfect model of youthful beauty, and
possessed of all the high spirits and happy _insouciance_ which can only
charm at that early period. He loved his profession, and had already
distinguished himself in it. He was handsome, brave, good-hearted, and
good-humoured, but he was not clever; and Mary felt some solicitude as
to the permanency of of Lady Emily's attachment to him. But Lady Emily,
quick-sighted to the defects of the whole world, seemed happily blind to
those of her lover; and when even Mary's spirits were almost exhausted
by his noisy rattle, Lady Emily, charmed and exhilarated, entered into
all his practical jokes and boyish frolics with the greatest delight.

She soon perceived what was passing in Mary's mind.

"I see perfectly well what you think of my _penchant_ for Edward," said
she one day; "I can tell you exactly what was passing in your thoughts
just now. You were thinking how strange, how passing strange it is, that
I, who am (false modesty avaunt!) certainly cleverer than Edward, should
yet be so partial to him, and that my lynx eyes should have failed to
discover in him faults which, with a single glance, I should have
detected in others. Now, can't you guess what renders even these very
faults so attractive to me?"

"The old story, I suppose?" said Mary. "Love."

"Not at all. Love might blind me to his faults altogether, and then my
case would be indeed hopeless, were I living in the belief that I was
loving a piece of perfection--a sort of Apollo Belvidere in mind as well
as in person. Now, so far from that, I could reckon you up a whole
catalogue of his faults; and nevertheless, I love him with my whole
heart, faults and all. In the first place, they are the faults with
which I have been familiar from infancy; and therefore they possess a
charm (to my shame be it said!) greater than other people's virtues
would have to me. They come over my fancy like some snatch of an old
nursery song, which one loves to hear in defiance of taste and reason,
merely because it is something that carries us back to those days which,
whatever they were in reality, always look bright and sunny in
retrospection. In the s