Let him once perceive ground for dissatisfaction or suspicion, and his eye is keen as light itself to penetrate and unravel.' Such good qualities as lady Margaret accorded her cousin were of a sort more fitted to please a less sedate and sober-minded damsel than Dorothy, who was fashioned rather after the model of a puritan than a royalist maiden.

Pleased with his address and his behaviour to herself as she could hardly fail to be, she yet felt a lingering mistrust of him, which sprang quite as much from the immediate impression as from her mistress's judgment of him, for it always gave her a sense of not coming near the real man in him.

There is one thing a hypocrite even can never do, and that is, hide the natural signs of his hypocrisy; and Rowland, who was no hypocrite, only a man not half so honourable as he chose to take himself for, could not conceal his unreality from the eyes of his simple country cousin.

Little, however, did Dorothy herself suspect whence she had the idea,--that it was her girlhood's converse with real, sturdy, honest, straight-forward, simple manhood, in the person of the youth of fiery temper, and obstinate, opinionated, sometimes even rude behaviour, whom she had chastised with terms of contemptuous rebuke, which had rendered her so soon capable of distinguishing between a profound and a shallow, a genuine and an unreal nature, even when the latter comprehended a certain power of fascination, active enough to be recognisable by most of the women in the castle.
Concerning this matter, it will suffice to say that lord Worcester--who ruled his household with such authoritative wisdom that honest Dr.Bayly avers he never saw a better-ordered family--never saw a man drunk or heard an oath amongst his servants, all the time he was chaplain in the castle,--would have been scandalized to know the freedoms his favourite indulged himself in, and regarded as privileged familiarities.
There was much coming and going of visitors--more now upon state business than matters of friendship or ceremony; and occasional solemn conferences were held in the marquis's private room, at which sometimes lord John, who was a personal friend of the king's, and sometimes lord Charles, the governor of the castle, with perhaps this or that officer of dignity in the household, would be present; but whoever was or was not present, lord Herbert when at home was always there, sometimes alone with his father and commissioners from the king.

His absences, however, had grown frequent now that his majesty had appointed him general of South Wales, and he had considerable forces under his command--mostly raised by himself, and maintained at his own and his father's expense.
It was some time after Dorothy had twice in one day met him darkling, before she saw him in the light, and was able to peruse his countenance, which she did carefully, with the mingled instinct and insight of curious and thoughtful girlhood.