But Julia had been bred in a lower condition, not far removed from that of the Pamela to whose good fortune she had humbly likened her own; among people who regarded a Macaroni or a man of fashion as a wolf ever seeking to devour.  To distrust a gentleman and repel his advances had been one of the first lessons instilled into her opening mind; nor had she more than emerged from childhood before she knew that a laced coat forewent destruction, and held the wearer of it a cozener, who in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred kept no faith with a woman beneath him, but lived only to break hearts and bring grey hairs to the grave.

Out of this fixed belief she had been jolted by the upheaval that placed her on a level with Sir George.  Persuaded that the convention no longer applied to herself, she had given the rein to her fancy and her girlish romance, no less than to her generosity; she had indulged in delicious visions, and seen them grow real; nor probably in all St. James’s was there a happier woman than Julia when she found herself possessed of this lover of the prohibited class; who to the charms and attractions, the nice-ness and refinement, which she had been bred to consider beyond her reach, added a devotion, the more delightful—­since he believed her to be only what she seemed—­as it lay in her power to reward it amply.  Some women would have swooned with joy over such a conquest effected in such circumstances.  What wonder that Julia was deaf to the warnings and surmises of Mr. Fishwick, whom delay and the magnitude of the stakes rendered suspicious, as well as to the misgivings of old Mrs. Masterson, slow to grasp a new order of things?  It would have been strange had she listened to either, when youth, and wealth, and love all beckoned one way.

But now, now in the horror and darkness of the post-chaise, the lawyer’s warnings and the old woman’s misgivings returned on her with crushing weight; and more and heavier than these, her old belief in the heartlessness, the perfidy of the man of rank.  At the statement that a man of the class with whom she had commonly mixed could so smile, while he played the villain, as to deceive not only her eyes but her heart—­she would have laughed.  But on the mind that lay behind the smooth and elegant mask of a gentleman’s face she had no lights; or only the old lights which showed it desperately wicked.  Applying these to the circumstances, what a lurid glare they shed on his behaviour!  How quickly, how suspiciously quickly, had he succumbed to her charms!  How abruptly had his insouciance changed to devotion, his impertinence to respect!  How obtuse, how strangely dull had he been in the matter of her claims and her identity!  Finally, with what a smiling visage had he lured her to her doom, showed her to his tools, settled to a nicety the least detail of the crime!