When at the age of seventeen Alicia Malcolm was produced in the world.  She was a rational, cheerful, and sweet-tempered girl, with a finely formed person, and a countenance in which was so clearly painted the sunshine of her breast, that it attracted the bienveillance even of those who had not taste or judgment to define the charm.  Her open natural manner, blending the frankness of the Scotch with the polished reserve of the English woman, her total exemption from vanity, calculated alike to please others and maintain her own cheerfulness undimmed by a single cloud.

Lady Audley felt for her niece a sentiment which she mistook for affection; her self-approbation was gratified at the contemplation of a being who owed every advantage to her, and whom she had rescued from the coarseness and vulgarity which she deemed inseparable from the manners of every Scotchwoman.  If Lady Audley really loved any human being it was her son.  In him were centred her dearest interests; on his aggrandisement and future importance hung her most sanguine hopes.  She had acted contrary to the advice of her male relations, and followed her own judgment, by giving her son a private education.  He was brought up under her own eye by a tutor of deep erudition, but who was totally unfitted for forming the mind, and compensating for those advantages which may be derived from a public education.  The circumstances of his education, however, combined rather to stifle the exposure than to destroy the existence of some very dangerous qualities that seemed inherent in Sir Edmund’s nature.  He was ardent, impetuous, and passionate, though these propensities were cloaked by a reserve, partly natural, and partly arising from of his mother and tutor.

His was not the effervescence of character which bursts forth on every trivial occasion; but when any powerful cause awakened the slumbering inmates, of his breast, they blazed with an uncontrolled fury that defied all opposition, and overleaped all bounds of reason and decorum.

Experience often shows us that minds formed of the most opposite attributes more forcibly attract each other than those which appear cast in the same mould.  The source of this fascination is difficult to trace; it possesses not reason for its basis, yet it is perhaps the more tyrannical in its influence from that very cause.  The weakness of our natures occasionally makes us feel a potent charm in “errors of a noble mind.”

Sir Edmund Audley and Alicia Malcolm proved examples of this observation.  The affection of childhood had so gradually ripened into a warmer sentiment, that neither was conscious of the nature of that sentiment till after it had attained strength to cast a material influence on their after lives.  The familiarity of near relatives associating constantly together produced a warm sentiment of affection, cemented by similarity of pursuits, and enlivened by diversity of character; while the perfect tranquillity of their lives afforded no event that could withdraw the veil of ignorance from their eyes.