After this morning, Alfred not only joined his new friends whenever they appeared, but became in a short time almost a daily visitor at Jessamine bower; and apparently with the entire approbation of Lady Palliser. Indeed, it was in general some message or some commission of her ladyship's, or some allusion to the morrow made at parting, almost amounting to an appointment, which furnished him with an excuse for calling. He, poor fellow, was flattered, delighted, filled with hope and joy! But, alas! he was not sufficiently acquainted with the character of Lady Palliser to understand his own position. Her ladyship was a being without affections and without occupation; who in her intercourse with others, and from total heartlessness, cared not whose best feelings were the springs of the puppet-show, so the movements of the puppets amused her--and he happened to be the whim of the hour;--to order him about, to see him perfectly at her disposal, chanced to be what, just then, afforded a species of excitement to her restless idleness and morbid selfishness. CHAPTER XV. Meanwhile much of Caroline's excessive reserve, or rather fearfulness of manner wore off. In her mother's immediate presence indeed she was ever the same; but if Lady Palliser quitted the room for a moment, or was occupied conversing with some other visitor, Caroline's countenance would brighten, and her manner become comparatively easy and happy. Fully, however, to comprehend our heroine, it will be necessary to cast a retrospective glance over the manner of her education. The most painful silence of the heart and all its best affections had from infancy been habitual to Caroline. She was an only child, and had no recollection of her father; while her mother's strange, unfeeling character, had made her from the very first shrink within herself. When arrived at an age at which young people, not self-opinionated, naturally wish to ask those older than themselves what they ought to do on various little occasions, which seem to them important from their novelty, poor Caroline would sometimes, in what she deemed a case of urgency, make a great effort and apply to her mother, on which Lady Palliser would treat her simplicity as the best of good jokes, laugh to excess, then rally her for blushing, and next perhaps for shedding tears; and, finally, either leave her question without reply, or give one turning the subject into absolute ridicule; till at last Caroline learned to feel a terror surpassing description of having any one thought, feeling, or opinion even guessed at by her mother. Yet her mother was her only companion. There was also a strange inconsistency in the character and conduct of Lady Palliser; for while she never condescended to advise, she was tyrannical in her commands, exacting implicit, unquestioned, instantaneous obedience to every whim.