Yet strange as it seemed, it was so; in this instance, Mrs. Elizabeth had not deceived herself; and thus it was that two so near of kin as mother and daughter, met, it might be said, for the first time. Villiers was inexpressibly shocked; and believing that Lady Lodore must suffer keenly from so strange and unnatural an incident, his first kindly impulse was to seek to see her on the following morning. During her absence, the violent attack of her sister-in-law had weighed with him, but her look at once dissipated his uneasy doubts. There was that in this lady, which no man could resist; she had joined to her beauty, the charm of engaging manners, made up of natural grace, vivacity, intuitive tact, and soft sensibility, which infused a kind of idolatry into the admiration with which she was universally regarded. But it was not the beauty and fashion of Lady Lodore which caused Villiers to take a deep interest in her. His intercourse with her had been of long standing, and the object of his very voyage to America was intimately connected with her. Edward Villiers was the son of a man of fortune. His father had been left a widower young in life, with this only child, who, thus single and solitary in his paternal home, became almost adopted into the family of his mother's brother, Viscount Maristow. This nobleman being rich, married, and blessed with a numerous progeny, the presence of little Edward was not felt as a burthen, and he was brought up with his cousins like one of them. Among these it would have been hard if Villiers could not have found an especial friend: this was not the elder son, who, much his senior, looked down upon him with friendly regard; it was the second, who was likewise several years older. Horatio Saville was a being fashioned for every virtue and distinguished by every excellence; to know that a thing was right to be done, was enough to impel Horatio to go through fire and water to do it; he was one of those who seem not to belong to this world, yet who adorn it most; conscientious, upright, and often cold in seeming, because he could always master his passions; good over-much, he might be called, but that there was no pedantry nor harshness in his nature. Resolute, aspiring, and true, his noble purposes and studious soul, demanded a frame of iron, and he had one of the frailest mechanism. It was not that he was not tall, well-shaped, with earnest eyes, a brow built up high to receive and entertain a capacious mind; but he was thin and shadowy, a hectic flushed his cheek, and his voice was broken and mournful. At school he held the topmost place, at college he was distinguished by the energy with which he pursued his studies; and these, so opposite from what might have been expected to be the pursuits of his ardent mind, were abstruse metaphysics--the highest and most theoretical mathematics, and cross-grained argument, based upon hair-fine logic; to these he addicted himself.