as much as to say, Here is Satan preaching a sermon on holiness.  But however satirical and intolerant you may think me, you must own that I take no delight in the discovery of other people’s faults:  if I want the meekness of a Christian, at least I don’t possess the malice of a Jew.  Now Mrs. Downe Wright has a real heartfelt satisfaction in saying malicious things, and in thrusting herself into company where she must know she is unwelcome, for the sole purpose of saying them.  Yet many people are blessed with such blunt perceptions that they are not at all aware of her real character, and only wonder, when she has left them, what made them feel so uncomfortable when she was present.  But she has put me in such a bad humour that I must go out of door and apostrophise the sun, like Lucifer.  Do come, Mary, you will help to dispel my chagrin.  I really feel as if my heart had been in a limekiln.  All its kingly feelings are so burnt up by the malignant influences of Mrs. Downe Wright; while you,” continued she, as they strolled into the gardens, “are as cool, and as sweet, and as sorrowful as these violets,” gathering some still wet with an April shower.  “How delicious, after such a mental sirocco, to feel the pure air and hear the birds sing, and look upon the flowers and blossoms, and sit here, and bask in the sun from laziness to walk into the shade.  You must needs acknowledge, Mary, that spring in England is a much more amiable season than in your ungentle clime.”

This was the second spring Mary had seen set in, in England.  But the first had been wayward and backward as the seasons of her native climate.  The present was such a one as poets love to paint.  Nature was in all its first freshness and beauty—­the ground was covered with flowers, the luxuriant hedgerows were white with blossoms, the air was impregnated with the odours of the gardens and orchards.  Still Mary sighed as she thought of Lochmarlie—­its wild tangled woods, with here and there a bunch of primroses peeping forth from amidst moss and withered ferns—­its gurgling rills, blue lakes, and rocks, and mountains—­all rose to view; and she felt that, even amid fairer scenes, and beneath brighter suns, her heart would still turn with fond regret to the land of her birth.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

“Wondrous it is, to see in diverse mindes
How diversly Love doth his pageants play
And shows his power in variable kinds.”

         SPENSER.

BUT even the charms of spring were overlooked by Lady Emily in the superior delight she experienced at hearing that the ship in which Edward Douglas was had arrived at Portsmouth; and the intelligence was soon followed by his own arrival at Beech Park.  He was received by her with rapture, and by Mary with the tenderest emotion.  Lord Courtland was always glad of an addition to the family party; and even Lady Juliana experienced something like emotion as she beheld her son, now the exact image of what his father had been twenty years before.