Into this delicate world of happiness, in which there was nothing real, but all imagination, Lottie was delivered over that bright Sunday. She had no defence against it, and she did not wish to have any. She gave herself up to the dream. After that interval of heaviness, of darkness, when there was no pleasant delusion to support her, and life, with all its difficulties and dangers, became so real, confronting her at every point, what an escape it was for Lottie to find herself again under the dreamy skies of that fool’s paradise! It was the Garden of Eden to her. She thought it was the true world, and the other the false one. The vague terror and disgust with which her father’s new plans filled her mind floated away like a mist; and, as for Law, what so easy as to carry him with her into the better world where she was going? Her mind in a moment was lightened of its load. She had left home heavily; she went back scarcely able to keep from singing in the excess of her light-heartedness, more lifted above earth than if any positive good had come to her. So long as the good is coming, and exists in the imagination only, how much more entrancing is it than anything real that ever can be ours! The same event, however, which had so much effect upon Lottie acted upon her family too in a manner for which she was far from being prepared. Captain Despard came in as much elated visibly as she was in her heart. There had been but little intercourse among them since the evening when the Captain had made those inquiries about Rollo, which Lottie resented so deeply. The storm had blown over, and she had nominally forgiven Law for going over to the enemy’s side; but Lottie’s heart had been shut even against her brother since that night. He had forsaken her, and she had not been able to pass over his desertion of her cause. However, her heart had softened with her happiness, and she made his tea for him now more genially than she had done for weeks before. They seated themselves round the table with, perhaps, less constraint than usual--a result due to the smiling aspect of the Captain as well as to the softened sentiment in Lottie’s heart. Once upon a time a family tea was a favourite feature in English literature, from Cowper down to Dickens, not to speak of the more exclusively domestic fiction of which it is the chosen banquet. A great deal has been said of this nondescript (and indigestible) meal. But perhaps there must be a drawing of the curtains, a wheeling-in of the sofa, a suggestion of warmth and comfort in contradistinction to storms and chills outside, as in the Opium-eater’s picture of his cottage, to carry out the ideal--circumstances altogether wanting to the tea of the Despards, which was _eaten_ (_passez-moi le mot_, for is it not the bread-and-butter that makes the meal?) in the warmest hour of an August afternoon. The window, indeed, was open, and the Dean’s Walk, by which the townspeople were coming and going in