‘Only to ease my mind by expressing for once part of what I think; and then to make you better satisfied with yourself.’

‘By assuring me that my kinswoman is my sincere friend?’

‘Just so; I am your sincere friend, Robert.’

‘And I am—what chance and change shall make me, Lina.’

‘Not my enemy, however?’

The answer was cut short by Sarah and her mistress entering the kitchen together in some commotion. They had been improving the time which Mr. Moore and Miss Helstone had spent in dialogue by a short dispute on the subject of ‘caf\da\e au lait,’ which Sarah said was the queerest mess she ever saw, and a waste of God’s good gifts, as it was ‘the nature of coffee to be boiled in water’; and which Mademoiselle affirmed to be ‘un breuvage royal,’ a thousand times too good for the mean person who objected to it.

The former occupants of the kitchen now withdrew into the parlour. Before Hortense followed them, Caroline had only time again to question, ‘Not my enemy, Robert?’ and Moore, Quaker-like, had replied with another query, ‘Could I be?’ and then, seating himself at the table, had settled Caroline at his side.

Caroline scarcely heard Mademoiselle’s explosion of wrath when she rejoined them; the long declamation about the ‘conduite indigne de cette m\da\echante cr\da\eature’ sounded in her ear as confusedly as the agitated rattling of the china. Robert laughed a little at it, in very subdued sort, and then, politely and calmly entreating his sister to be tranquil, assured her that if it would yield her any satisfaction, she should have her choice of an attendant amongst all the girls in his mill; only he feared they would scarcely suit her, as they were most of them, he was informed, completely ignorant of household work, and pert and self-willed as Sarah was, she was, perhaps, no worse than the majority of the women of her class.

Mademoiselle admitted the truth of this conjecture; according to her, ‘ces paysannes Anglaises \da\etaient tout insupportables.’ What would she not give for some ‘bonne cuisini\dg\ere Anversoise,’ with a high cap, short petticoat, and decent sabots proper to her class; something better, indeed, than an insolent coquette in a flounced gown, and absolutely without cap (for Sarah, it appears, did not partake the opinion of St. Paul that ‘it is a shame for a woman to go with her head uncovered,’ but, holding rather a contrary doctrine, resolutely refused to imprison in linen or muslin the plentiful tresses of her yellow hair, which it was her wont to fasten up smartly with a comb behind, and on Sundays to wear curled in front).

‘Shall I try and get you an Antwerp girl?’ asked Mr. Moore, who, stern in public, was on the whole very kind in private.

‘Merci du cadeau!’ was the answer. ‘An Antwerp girl would not stay here ten days, sneered at as she would be by all the young coquines in your factory.’ Then, softening: ‘You are very good, dear brother. Excuse my petulance, but truly my domestic trials are severe, yet they are probably my destiny; for I recollect that our revered mother experienced similar sufferings, though she had the choice of all the best servants in Antwerp. Domestics are in all countries a spoiled and unruly set.’

Mr. Moore had also certain reminiscences about the trials of his revered mother. A good mother she had been to him, and he honoured her memory, but he recollected that she kept a hot kitchen of it in Antwerp, just as his faithful sister did here in England. Thus, therefore, he let the subject drop, and when the coffee-service was removed, proceeded to console Hortense by fetching her music-book and guitar, and, having arranged the ribbon of the instrument round her neck with a quiet fraternal kindness he knew to be all-powerful in soothing her most ruffled moods, he asked her to give him some of their mother’s favourite songs.