meantime he (Moore), as an individual, would be crushed, his hopes ground to dust. It was himself he had to care for, his hopes he had to pursue, and he would fulfil his destiny.

He fulfilled it so vigorously that ere long he came to a decisive rupture with his old Tory friend, the Rector. They quarrelled at a public meeting, and afterwards exchanged some pungent letters in the newspapers. Mr. Helstone denounced Moore as a Jacobin, ceased to see him, would not even speak to him when they met; he intimated also to his niece, very distinctly, that her communications with Hollow’s Cottage must for the present cease; she must give up taking French lessons. The language, he observed, was a bad and frivolous one at the best, and most of the works it boasted were bad and frivolous, highly injurious in their tendency to weak female minds. He wondered (he remarked parenthetically) what noodle first made it the fashion to teach women French: nothing was more improper for them; it was like feeding a rickety child on chalk and water gruel; Caroline must give it up, and give up her cousins too: they were dangerous people.

Mr. Helstone quite expected opposition to this order: he expected tears. Seldom did he trouble himself about Caroline’s movements, but a vague idea possessed him that she was fond of going to Hollow’s Cottage; also he suspected that she liked Robert Moore’s occasional presence at the Rectory. The Cossack had perceived that whereas if Malone stepped in of an evening to make himself sociable and charming, by pinching the ears of an aged black cat, which usually shared with Miss Helstone’s feet the accommodation of her footstool, or by borrowing a fowling-piece, and banging away at a tool-shed door in the garden, while enough of daylight remained to show that conspicuous mark—keeping the passage and sitting- room doors meantime uncomfortably open for the convenience of running in and out to announce his failures and successes with noisy brusquerie—he had observed that under such entertaining circumstances Caroline had a trick of disappearing, tripping noiselessly upstairs, and remaining invisible till called down to supper. On the other hand, when Robert Moore was the guest, though he elicited no vivacities from the cat, did nothing to it, indeed, beyond occasionally coaxing it from the stool to his knee, and there letting it purr, climb to his shoulder, and rub its head against his cheek; though there was no ear-splitting cracking off of firearms, no diffusion of sulphurous gunpowder perfume, no noise, no boasting during his stay, that still Caroline sat in the room, and seemed to find wondrous content in the stitching of Jew- basket pincushions and the knitting of Missionary-basket socks.

She was very quiet, and Robert paid her little attention, scarcely ever addressing his discourse to her; but Mr. Helstone, not being one of those elderly gentlemen who are easily blinded, on the contrary, finding himself on all occasions extremely wide awake, had watched them when they bade each other goodnight: he had just seen their eyes meet once—only once. Some natures would have taken pleasure in the glance then surprised, because there was no harm and some delight in it. It was by no means a glance of mutual intelligence, for mutual love-secrets existed not between them; there was nothing then of craft and concealment to offend; only Mr. Moore’s eyes, looking into Caroline’s, felt they were clear and gentle, and Caroline’s eyes encountering Mr. Moore’s confessed they were manly and searching: each acknowledged the charm in his or her own way. Moore smiled slightly, and Caroline coloured as slightly. Mr. Helstone could, on the spot, have rated them both; they annoyed him; why?—impossible to say. If you had asked him what Moore merited at that moment, he would have said ‘a horsewhip;’ if you had inquired into Caroline’s deserts, he would have adjudged her a box on the ear; if you had further demanded the reason of such chastisements, he would have stormed against flirtation and love-making, and vowed he would have no such folly going on under his roof.

These private considerations, combined with political reasons, fixed his resolution of separating the cousins. He announced his will to Caroline one evening, as she was sitting at work near the drawing-room window; her face was turned towards him, and the light fell full upon it. It had struck him a few minutes before that she was looking paler and quieter than she used to look; it had not escaped him either that Robert Moore’s name had never, for some three weeks past, dropped from her lips; nor during the same space of time had that personage made his appearance at the Rectory. Some suspicion of clandestine meetings haunted his mind; having but an indifferent opinion of women, he always suspected them; he thought they needed constant watching. It was in a tone dryly significant he desired her to cease her daily visits to the Hollow; he