Evelyn--his equal in rank; Evelyn, well cultivated; Evelyn, so long
courted, so deeply studied--had such advantages over the poor peasant
girl! Still the poor peasant girl often seemed to smile on him from that
fair face; and in Evelyn he half loved Alice again!

So these two persons now met daily; their intercourse was even more
familiar than before, their several minds grew hourly more developed and
transparent to each other. But of love Maltravers still forbore to
speak; they were friends,--no more; such friends as the disparity of
their years and their experience might warrant them to be. And in that
young and innocent nature--with its rectitude, its enthusiasm, and its
pious and cheerful tendencies--Maltravers found freshness in the desert,
as the camel-driver lingering at the well. Insensibly his heart warmed
again to his kind; and as the harp of David to the ear of Saul, was the
soft voice that lulled remembrance and awakened hope in the lonely man.

Meanwhile, what was the effect that the presence, the attentions, of
Maltravers produced on Evelyn? Perhaps it was of that kind which most
flatters us and most deceives. She never dreamed of comparing him with
others. To her thoughts he stood aloof and alone from all his kind. It
may seem a paradox, but it might be that she admired and venerated him
almost too much for love. Still her pleasure in his society was so
evident and unequivocal, her deference to his opinion so marked, she
sympathized in so many of his objects, she had so much blindness or
forbearance for his faults (and he never sought to mask them), that the
most diffident of men might have drawn from so many symptoms hopes the
most auspicious. Since the departure of Legard, the gayeties of Paris
lost their charm for Evelyn, and more than ever she could appreciate the
society of her friend. He thus gradually lost his earlier fears of her
forming too keen an attachment to the great world; and as nothing could