Through the whole affair, since he had discovered the traces of De Vaux's footsteps on the common, and the marks of bloodshed at the quarry, hope had offered to the mind of Charles Manners but one suggestion to diminish his apprehensions for the fate of his friend; and that suggestion, strange enough to say, was that the countenance, the demeanour, and the language of the gipsy Pharold were not those of a man familiar with guilt or designing evil. Colonel Manners was too much a man of the world, and too much a man of sense, to suffer such impressions to affect his conduct in the slightest degree. He knew that this earth contains every grade and every sort of hypocrisy; and that Satan himself will occasionally assume the form of an angel of light: but at the same time, although his behaviour was on all occasions guarded by what he had learned from experience, yet through life he had preserved his natural enthusiasm unblunted by the hard world in which we live; and there was thus in his character a rare mingling of ardent and energetic feelings with calm and well calculated actions, which formed the specific difference between him and the general herd with which he moved. During his conversation with Pharold he had remarked a dignity, not alone of manner, but of thought, in the gipsy, opposed to all the habits of his tribe, and which must have been difficult to retain among them at all, but still more difficult to assume, if it was not natural and habitual,--if it sprang not from a heart at ease in itself, and a consciousness of virtue and intellect superior to the things through which it passed. His countenance, too, had appeared to him open and frank, though wild and keen; and Manners wished much to believe that vice or crime, in general, more or less affect the expression of the human face. All this had struck him; and though, as we have said before, he suffered not these impressions to affect his conduct in the least, opposed as they were to known facts, and circumstances of great probability, yet hope still whispered, surely that gipsy was not a man either to plan or to commit so dreadful a deed as the indications he had met with would have naturally led him to suspect. It may well be supposed, then, that the numerous and dark charges brought forward so boldly by the peer startled Manners not a little; and as he had no cause to believe that Lord Dewry was instigated by any motive to prefer a false accusation against the gipsy, he could only conclude that he himself had been deceived in his estimation of Pharold's character by the most skilful and consummate hypocrisy.