on a visit to Hamley Hall, where the sweet child has become the loved companion of Mrs. Hamley—an intimacy which irresistibly recalls the charming first sketch of a similar intimacy (between Mrs. Buxton and Maggie) in Mrs. Gaskell’s early tale of “The Moorland Cottage.” With consummate art, we are made to understand how Molly’s thoughts are unconsciously familiarised with the notion of her father marrying again by Squire Hamley’s loose talk of what might have been; but how the fact of his avowed intention all the more completely overpowers her, because she is unable to realise it all at once. It must not be forgotten how utterly overwhelming great grief—like great joy—is to the young, if the whole force of the scene is to be acknowledged in which Molly receives the news of her father’s resolve from his own faltering lips. How magnificent (I use the word deliberately) is the following passage —one of those which prove how, where words can be found for describing supreme moments of passion, the true tragic touch is not out of place in the simplest prose:—

“She had cast³ herself on the ground—that natural throne for violent sorrow³—and leant up against the old moss-grown seat; sometimes burying her face in her hands; sometimes clasping them together, as if by the tight painful grasp of her fingers she could deaden the mental suffering.”

But even this trial—in its first sharp incidence, and as afterwards long drawn-out by the girl’s growing conviction of the hollowness of her step-mother’s nature—irretentive, like Quarles’ emblem of the world: “She’s empty; hark! she sounds”—was not the hardest that befell the pure-hearted, high-souled Molly. Gradually she came to love Roger, at whose first crossing of her orbit everything had been in his disfavour, but whom she had learnt to honour as a counsellor and friend, before she became conscious, without confessing it to herself, that he was master of her heart. Gradually—but not too soon, since with unreasoning suddenness Roger himself had fallen in love with the bewitching Cynthia. So it is as Cynthia’s, not as her own, accepted lover that Molly sees Roger depart on his journey into remote regions and perils incalculable. And I do not think that a picture more cruelly devised à serrer le cœur of all beholders was ever painted than that of Roger, after his last farewells had been spoken, running back to catch the London coach, and turning round and shading his eyes from the westering sun, as he looked back to the Gibsons’ house, in the hope of catching one more glimpse of Cynthia.

“But apparently he saw no one, not even Molly at the attic casement; for she had drawn back when he turned, and kept herself in shadow; for she had no right to put herself forward as the one to watch and yearn for farewell signs. None came—another moment—he was out of sight for years.”

Molly was to make great sacrifices for Cynthia’s sake before the end of her own troubles was reached. But it was without her telling herself why, that her woman’s courage quailed at parting with one who “had been to her as a brother,” and that “her weary, aching head in that supreme moment sought a loving pillow” on the shoulder of her whom this “prince amongst men” had “honoured with his love.”

Cynthia—the fascinating, the irresistible Cynthia—in everything except charm Molly’s opposite, is the other “daughter” of the story. Molly is, in more respects than one, a more perfect, while an entirely natural, variation of a type specially sympathetic to Mrs. Gaskell; but she never, I think, drew any character really similar to Cynthia. The difficulty of making such a personality the twin heroine of the story did not lie in its want of verisimilitude. For who would hesitate in approving from experience the statement that to some women (it is better to confine oneself to their sex) is given the unconscious power of fascination which Cynthia is represented as possessing; and who will gainsay the surmise, that the constant exercise of such a power is incompatible with very high principle; as its essence seems to consist in the most exquisite power of adaptation to varying people and still more varying moods; “being all things to all men.” The difficulty of representing such a character in fiction lies rather in the almost unavoidable danger that in an imaginary narrative a personality of this kind is apt to sink into a type which fails to give pleasure to gods or men, when not themselves the objects or the victims of its wiles—a type which cannot be regarded as quite extinct, but which we shun so instinctively that now the term by which it used to be known is all but tabooed by lips polite— namely that of a flirt. Now Cynthia was something better than this. Not only was she, according to her own assertion, “capable of a great jerk and effort” of virtue (followed, to be sure, as she admitted, by a “relaxation”); but hers was a sweet nature in itself, and she