He sat silent, still caressing Tartar, who slobbered with exceeding affection. A faint twittering commenced among the trees round: something fluttered down as light as leaves: they were little birds, which, lighting on the sward at shy distance, hopped as if expectant.

‘The small brown elves actually remember that I fed them the other day,’ again soliloquised Louis. ‘They want some more biscuit: to-day I forgot to save a fragment. Eager little sprites, I have not a crumb for you.’

He put his hand in his pocket and drew it out empty.

‘A want easily supplied,’ whispered the listening Miss Keeldar.

She took from her reticule a morsel of sweet cake: for that repository was never destitute of something available to throw to the chickens, young ducks, or sparrows; she crumbled it, and, bending over his shoulder, put the crumbs into his hand.

‘There,’ said she; ‘there is a Providence for the improvident.’

‘This September afternoon is pleasant,’ observed Louis Moore, as—not at all discomposed—he calmly cast the crumbs on to the grass.

‘Even for you?’

‘As pleasant for me as for any monarch.’

‘You take a sort of harsh, solitary triumph in drawing pleasure out of the elements, and the inanimate and lower animate creation.’

‘Solitary, but not harsh. With animals I feel I am Adam’s son: the heir of him to whom dominion was given over “every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Your dog likes and follows me; when I go into that yard, the pigeons from your dove-cot flutter at my feet; your mare in the stable knows me as well as she knows you, and obeys me better.’

‘And my roses smell sweet to you, and my trees give you shade.’

‘And,’ continued Louis, ‘no caprice can withdraw these pleasures from me: they are mine.’

He walked off: Tartar followed him, as if in duty and affection bound, and Shirley remained standing on the summer-house step. Caroline saw her face as she looked after the rude tutor: it was pale, as if her pride bled inwardly.

‘You see,’ remarked Caroline apologetically, ‘his feelings are so often hurt, it makes him morose.’

‘You see,’ retorted Shirley, with ire, ‘he is a topic on which you and I shall quarrel if we discuss it often; so drop it henceforward and for ever.’

‘I suppose he has more than once behaved in this way,’ thought Caroline to herself; ‘and that renders Shirley so distant to him: yet I wonder she cannot make allowance for character and circumstances: I wonder the general modesty, manliness, sincerity of his nature, do not plead with her in his behalf. She is not often so inconsiderate—so irritable.’

The verbal testimony of two friends of Caroline’s to her cousin’s character augmented her favourable opinion of him. William Farren, whose cottage he had visited in company with Mr. Hall, pronounced him a ‘real gentleman’: there was not such another in Briarfield he—William—‘could do aught for that man. And then to see how t’ bairns liked him, and how t’ wife took to him first minute she saw him: he never