‘What was your pretext to induce him to come back here?’
‘To hear tidings of his family and kindred.’
‘Did you intimate to him that they were of rank and station?’
‘Yes, of the very highest.’
‘How did the news affect him?’
‘It was hard at first to convince him that they could be true. He had, besides, been so often tricked and deceived by false intelligence, and made the sport of craftier heads, that it was difficult to win his confidence; nor did I succeed until I told him certain facts about his early life, whose correctness he acknowledged.’
‘I had imagined him most unlike what I see. If Charles Edward had left a daughter she might have resembled this.’
‘Still that very resemblance is of great value.’
‘What signifies that a thing may look like gold, when at the first touch of the chemist’s test it blackens and betrays itself?’
‘He may be more of a Stuart even than he looks. It is too rash to judge of him as we see him now.’