With lady Margaret’s help, Dorothy came to a tolerable understanding of Scudamore.  Indeed her ladyship’s judgment seemed but a development of her own feeling concerning him.

‘Rowland is not a bad fellow,’ she said, ’but I cannot fully understand whence he comes in such grace with my lord Worcester.  If it were my husband now, I should not marvel:  he is so much occupied with things and engines, that he has as little time as natural inclination to doubt any one who will only speak largely enough to satisfy his idea.  But my lord of Worcester knows well enough that seldom are two things more unlike than men and their words.  Yet that is not what I mean to say of your cousin:  he is no hypocrite—­means not to be false, but has no rule of right in him so far as I can find.  He is pleasant company; his gaiety, his quips, his readiness of retort, his courtesy and what not, make him a favourite; and my lord hath in a manner reared him, which goes to explain much.  He is quick yet indolent, good-natured but selfish, generous but counting enjoyment the first thing,—­though, to speak truth of him, I have never known him do a dishonourable action.  But, in a word, the star of duty has not yet appeared above his horizon.  Pardon me, Dorothy, if I am severe upon him.  More or less I may misjudge him, but this is how I read him; and if you wonder that I should be able so to divide him, I have but to tell you that I should be unapt indeed if I had not yet learned of my husband to look into the heart of both men and things.’

‘But, madam,’ Dorothy ventured to say, ’have you not even now told me that from very goodness my lord is easily betrayed?’

’Well replied, my child!  It is true, but only while he has had no reason to mistrust.  Let him once perceive ground for dissatisfaction or suspicion, and his eye is keen as light itself to penetrate and unravel.’

Such good qualities as lady Margaret accorded her cousin were of a sort more fitted to please a less sedate and sober-minded damsel than Dorothy, who was fashioned rather after the model of a puritan than a royalist maiden.  Pleased with his address and his behaviour to herself as she could hardly fail to be, she yet felt a lingering mistrust of him, which sprang quite as much from the immediate impression as from her mistress’s judgment of him, for it always gave her a sense of not coming near the real man in him.  There is one thing a hypocrite even can never do, and that is, hide the natural signs of his hypocrisy; and Rowland, who was no hypocrite, only a man not half so honourable as he chose to take himself for, could not conceal his unreality from the eyes of his simple country cousin.  Little, however, did Dorothy herself suspect whence she had the idea,—­that it was her girlhood’s converse with real, sturdy, honest, straight-forward, simple manhood, in the person of the youth of fiery temper, and obstinate, opinionated, sometimes even rude behaviour, whom she had chastised with terms of contemptuous rebuke, which had rendered her so soon capable of distinguishing between a profound and a shallow, a genuine and an unreal nature, even when the latter comprehended a certain power of fascination, active enough to be recognisable by most of the women in the castle.