 CHAPTER X of SHIRLEY OLD MADES. Time wore on, and spring matured. The surface of England began to look pleasant. Her fields grew green, her hills fresh, her gardens blooming, but at heart she was no better. Still her poor were wretched, still their employers were harassed. Commerce, in some of its branches, seemed threatened with paralysis, for the war continued. England's blood was shed, and her wealth lavished—all it seemed, to attain most inadequate ends. Some tidings there were indeed occasionally of successes in the peninsula, but these came in slowly. Long intervals occurred between, in which no note was heard, but the insolent, self-felicitations of Bonaparte on his continued triumphs. Those who suffered from the results of the war felt this tedious, and, as they thought, hopeless struggle against what their fears or their interests taught them to regard as an invincible power—most insufferable. They demanded peace on any terms—men, like York and more, and there were thousands whom the war placed where it placed them, shattering on the verge of bankruptcy, insisted on peace with the energy of desperation. They held meetings, they made speeches, they got up petitions to extort the spoon, on what terms it was made they cared not. All men, taken singly, are more or less selfish, and taken in bodies they are intensely so. The British merchant is no exception to this rule. The mercantile classes illustrate it strikingly. These classes certainly think too exclusively of making money. They are too oblivious of every national consideration, but that of extending England's, i.e. their own, commerce. Allerous feeling, disinterestedness, pride and honour is too dead in their hearts. A land ruled by them alone would too often make ignominious submission, not at all from the motives Christ teaches, but rather from those mammon instills. During the late war the tradesmen of England would have endured buffets from the French on the right cheek and on the left, their cloak they would have given to Napoleon, and then have politely offered him their coat also. Where would they have withheld their waistcoat, if urged? They would have prayed permission only to retain their one other garment, for the sake of the purse in its pocket. Not one spark of spirit, not one symptom of resistance, would they have shown till the hand of the Corsican bandit had grasped that beloved purse. Then perhaps, transfigured at once into British bulldogs, they would have sprung at the robber's throat, and there they would have fastened, and there hung, and veterate, insatiable till the treasure had been restored. Tradesmen, when they speak against war, always profess to hate it because it is a bloody and barbarous proceeding. You would think, to hear them talk, that they are peculiarly civilised, especially gentle and kindly of disposition to their fellow men. This is not the case. Many of them are extremely narrow and cold-hearted, have no good feeling for any class but their own, are distant, even hostile to all others, call them useless, seem to question their right to exist, seem to grudge them the very air they breathe, and to think the circumstance of their eating, drinking, and living in decent houses, quite unjustifiable. They do not know what others do in the way of helping, pleasing, or teaching their race. They will not trouble themselves to inquire, whoever is not in trade as accused of eating the bread of idleness, of passing a useless existence. Long may it be, ere England really becomes a nation of shopkeepers. We have already said that Moore was no self-sacrificing patriot, and we have also explained what circumstances rendered him specially prone to confine his attention and efforts to the furtherance of his individual interest. Accordingly, when he felt himself urged a second time to the brink of ruin, none struggled harder than he against the influences which would have thrust him over. What he could do towards stirring agitation in the north against the war, he did, and he instigated others whose money and connections gave them more power than he possessed. Sometimes by flashes he felt there was little reason in the demands his party made on government, when he heard all of Europe threatened by Bonaparte, and of all Europe arming to resist him. When he saw Russia menaced, and beheld Russia rising, incensed, and stern, to defend her frozen soil, her wild provinces of serfs, her dark native despotism, from the tread, the yoke, the tyranny of a foreign victor, he knew that England, a free realm, could not then dispute her sons to make concessions and propose terms to the unjust, grasping French leader. When news came, from time to time, of the movements of that man then representing England in the peninsula, of his advance from success to success, that advance so deliberate, but so unswerving, so circumspect, but so certain, so unhasting, but so unresting. When he read Lord Wellington's own dispatches in the columns of the newspapers, documents written by modesty to the dictation of truth, more confessed at heart that a power was with the troops of Britain, of that vigilant, enduring, genuine, unaustentatious sort which must win victory to the side it led in the end. In the end, but that end he thought was yet far off, and in the meantime it was himself he had to care for, his hopes he had to pursue, and he would fulfill his destiny. He fulfilled it so vigorously that ere long he came to a decisive rupture with his old Tory friend, the rector. They quarreled at a public meeting, and afterwards exchanged some pungent letters in the newspapers. Mr. Hellstone 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-grewle. Caroline must give it up, and give up her cousins too. They were dangerous people. Mr. Hellstone quite expected opposition to this order. He expected tears. Some 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 Hellstone's feet the accommodation of her footstool, or by borrowing a fouling piece and banging away at a toolshed door in the garden while enough daylight remained to show that conspicuous mark. Keeping the passage in sitting-room doors meantime uncomfortably open for the convenience of running in and out to announce his failures and successes with noisy brusquery, 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 rabbit's head against his cheek, though there was no ear splitting cracking off of firearms, no diffusion of sulfurous 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 pin-crushions, 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. Hellstone, 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 good night. 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 colored as slightly. Mr. Hellstone 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 horse whip. If you had inquired into Caroline's desserts, 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. Moore, during the same space of time, had that personage made his appearance at the rectory. Some suspicion of clandestine meetings haunted him, 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 expected a start, a look of deprecation. The start he saw, but it was a very slight one. No look whatever was directed to him. "'Do you hear me?' he asked. "'Yes, uncle. Of course you mean to attend to what I say. Yes, certainly. And there must be no letter scribbling to your cousin Hortense. No intercourse whatever. I do not approve of the principles of the family. They are Jacob and Nicole.' "'Very well,' said Caroline quietly. She acquiesced then. There was no vexed fleshing of the face, no gathering tears. The shadowy thoughtfulness which had covered her features ere Mr. Hellstone spoke remained undisturbed. She was obedient. "'Yes, perfectly, because the mandate coincided with her own previous judgment, because it was now become pain to her to go to Hollow's Cottage. Nothing met her there but disappointment. Hope and love had quitted that little tenement, for Robert seemed to have deserted its precincts. Whenever she asked after him, which she very seldom did, since the mere utterance of his name made her face grow hot, the answer was, he was from home, or he was quite taken up with business. Hortense feared he was killing himself by application. He scarcely ever took a meal in the house. He lived in the counting-house. At church only, Caroline had the chance of seeing him, and there she rarely looked at him. It was both too much pain and too much pleasure to look. It excited too much emotion, and that it was all wasted emotion she had learned well to comprehend. Once on a dark, wet Sunday, when there were few people at church, and when especially certain ladies were absent of whose observant faculties and tomahawk tongues Caroline stood in awe, she had allowed her eye to seek Robert's pew, and to rest awhile on its occupant. He was there alone, Hortense had been kept at home by prudent considerations relative to the rain and a new spring chapeau. During the sermon, he sat with folded arms and eyes cast down, looking very sad and abstracted. When depressed, the very hue of his face seemed more dusk than when he smiled, and today cheek and forehead wore their most tintless and sober olive. By instinct Caroline knew, as she examined that clouded countenance, that his thoughts were running in no familiar or kindly channel, that they were far away, not merely from her, but from all which she could comprehend, or in which she could sympathize. Nothing that they had ever talked of together was now in his mind. He was wrapped from her by interests and responsibilities in which it was deemed such as she could have no part. Caroline meditated in her own way on the subject, speculated on his feelings, on his life, on his fears, on his fate, mused over the mystery of business, tried to comprehend more about it than had ever been told her. To understand its perplexities, liabilities, duties, exactions, endeavored to realize the state of mind a man of a man of business, to enter into it, feel what he would feel, aspire to what he would aspire. Her earnest wish was to see things as they were, and not to be romantic. By dint of effort she contrived to get a glimpse of the light of truth here and there, and hoped that Scant Ray might suffice to guide her. Different indeed, she concluded, is Robert's mental condition to mine. I think only of him, he has no room, no leisure to think of me. The feeling called love is and has been for two years the predominant emotion of my heart, always there, always awake, always astir. Would other feelings absorb his reflections and govern his faculties? He is rising now, going to leave the church, for service is over. Will he turn his head towards this pew? No, not once. He has not one look for me. That is hard. A kind glance would have made me happy till to-morrow. I have not got it. He would not give it. He is gone. Strange that grief should now almost choke me, because another human being's eye has failed to greet mine. That Sunday evening, Mr. Malone coming, as usual, to pass it with his rector, Caroline withdrew after tea to her chamber. Fanny, knowing her habits, had lit her a cheerful little fire, as the weather was so gusty and chill. Closeted there, silent and solitary, what could she do but think? She noiselessly paced to and fro the carpeted floor. Her head drooped, her hands folded. It was irksome to sit. The current of reflection ran rapidly through her mind. Tonight she was mutely excited. Mute was the room, mute the house. The double door of the study muffled the voices of the gentlemen. The servants were quiet in the kitchen, engaged with books their young mistress had lent them. Books which she had told them were fit for Sunday reading. And she herself had another of the same sort open on the table. But she could not read it. Theology was incomprehensible to her, and her own mind was too busy, teeming, wandering, to listen to the language of another mind. Then, too, her imagination was full of pictures, images of more, scenes where he and she had been together, when her fireside sketches, a glowing landscape of a hot summer afternoon, passed with him in the bosom of Nanaly Wood, divine vignettes of mild spring or mellow autumn moments, when she had sat at his side in hollows-cops, listening to the call of the May Cuckoo, or sharing the September treasure of nuts and ripe blackberries, a wild dessert which it was her morning's pleasure to collect in a little basket, and to cover with green leaves and fresh blossoms, and her afternoon's delight to administer to more, berry by berry, and nut by nut, like a bird feeding its fledgling. Wood's features and form were with her. The sound of his voice was quite distinct in her ear. His few caresses seemed renewed. But these joys, being hollow, were air-long, crushed in. The pictures faded, the voice failed. The visionary clasp melted chill from her hand, and where the warm seal of lips had made impress on her forehead, it felt now as if a sleety raindrop had fallen. She returned from an enchanted region to the real world. For nonelly wood in June she saw her narrow chamber. For the songs of birds and alleys she heard the rain on her casement. For the sigh of the south wind came the sob of the mournful east. And for more's manly companionship she had the thin illusion of her own dim shadow on the wall. Turning from the pale phantom which reflected herself in its outline, and her reverie in the drooped attitude of its dim head and colorless tresses, she sat down. An action would suit the frame of mind into which she was now declining. She said to herself, I have to live, perhaps, till seventy years. As far as I know I have good health. Half a century of existence may lie before me. How am I to occupy it? What am I to do to fill the interval of time which spreads between me and the grave? She reflected. I shall not be married, it appears, she continued. I suppose, as Robert does not care for me, I shall never have a husband to love, nor little children to take care of. Till lately I had reckoned securely on the duties and affections of wife and mother to occupy my existence. I considered somehow, as a matter of course, that I was growing up to the ordinary destiny, and never troubled myself to seek any other. But now I perceive plainly I may have been mistaken. Only I shall be an old maid. I shall live to see Robert married to someone else, some rich lady. I never shall marry. What was I created for, I wonder? Where is my place in the world? She mused again. Ah, I see, she pursued presently. That is the question which most old maids are puzzled to solve. Other people solve it for them by saying, your place is to do good to others, to be helpful whenever help is wanted. That is right in some measure, and a very convenient doctrine for the people who hold it. But I perceive that certain sets of human beings are very apt to maintain that other sets should give up their lives to them and their service, and then they requite them by praise. They call them devoted and virtuous. Is this enough? Is it to live? Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, and that existence which is given away to others for want of something of your own to bestow it on? I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation of self? I do not believe it. Undo humility makes tyranny. Weak concession creates selfishness. The Romish religion especially teaches renunciation of self, submission to others, and nowhere are found so many grasping tyrants as in the ranks of the Romish priesthood. Each human being has his share of rights. I suspect it would conduce to the happiness and welfare of all if each knew his allotment, and held to it as tenaciously as the martyr to his creed. Queer thoughts, these, that surge in my mind. Are they right thoughts? I am not certain. Well, life is short at the best. Seventy years, they say, pass like a vapor, like a dream when one awakeeth, and every path trod by human feet terminates in one born, the grave. The little chink in the surface of this great globe, the furrow where the mighty husband been with the scythe deposits the seed he has shaken from the ripe stem, and there it falls, decays, and then it springs again when the world has rolled round a few times more. So much for the body, the soul, meantime, wings its long flight upwards, fold its wings on the brink of the sea of fire and glass, and gazing down through the burning clearness, finds there mirrored the vision of the Christian's triple Godhead, the sovereign father, the meditating son, the creator spirit. Such words, at least, have been chosen to express what is inexpressible to describe what baffles description. The soul's real hereafter, who shall guess? Her fire was decayed to its last cinder, Malone had departed, and now the steady bell rang for prayers. CHAPTER X The next day Caroline had to spend altogether alone, her uncle being gone, to dine with his friend Dr. Boltby, vicar of Winbury. The whole time she was talking inwardly in the same strain, looking forwards, asking what she was to do with life. Fanny, as she passed in and out of the room occasionally, intent on housemaid Erin's, perceived that her young mistress sat very still. She was always in the same place, always bent industriously over a piece of work. She did not lift her head to speak to Fanny as her custom was, and when the latter remarked that the day was fine, and she ought to take a walk, she only said, it is cold. CHAPTER X You are very diligent at that sewing, Miss Caroline, continued the girl, approaching her little table. I am tired of it, Fanny. Then why do you go on with it? Put it down, read, or do something to amuse you. It is solitary in this house, Fanny, don't you think so? I don't find it so, Miss, me and Eliza are company for one another, but you are quite too still, you should visit more. Now, be persuaded, go upstairs and dress yourself smart, and go and take tea in a friendly way with Miss Mann or Miss Aenley. I am certain either of those ladies would be delighted to see you. But their houses are dismal, they are both old maids. I am certain old maids are a very unhappy race. Not they, Miss, they can't be unhappy. They take such care of themselves. They are all selfish. Miss Aenley is not selfish, Fanny. She is always doing good, how devotedly kind she was to her stepmother as long as the old lady lived, and now when she is quite alone in the world, without brother or sister or anyone to care for her, how charitable she is to the poor, as far as her means permit. Still nobody thinks much of her or has pleasure in going to see her, and how gentlemen always sneer at her. They shouldn't miss. I believe she is a good woman, but gentlemen think only of ladies' looks. I'll go and see her, exclaimed Caroline, starting up, and if she asks me to stay to tea, I'll stay. How wrong it is to neglect people because they are not pretty and young and merry, and I will certainly call to see Miss Mann, too. She may not be amiable, but what has made her unamiable? What has life been to her? Fanny helped Miss Hellstone to put away her work and afterwards assisted her to dress. You'll not be an old maid, Miss Caroline, she said, as she tied the sash of her brown silk frock, having previously smoothed her soft, full, and shining curls. There are no signs of an old maid about you. Caroline looked at the little mirror before her, and she thought there were some signs. She could see that she was altered within the last month, that the hues of her complexion were paler, her eyes changed, a wand shade seemed to circle them, her countenance was dejected. She was not, in short, so pretty or so fresh as she used to be. She distantly hinted this to Fanny, from whom she got no direct answer, only a remark that people did vary in their looks, but that at her age a little falling away signified nothing. She would soon come round again, and be plumper and rosier than ever. Having given this assurance, Fanny showed singular zeal in wrapping her up in warm shawls and handkerchiefs, till Caroline, nearly smothered with the weight, was feigned to resist further additions. She paid her visits, first to Miss Mann, for this was the most difficult point. Miss Mann was certainly not quite a lovable person. Till now Caroline had always unhesitatingly declared she disliked her, and more than once she had joined her cousin Robert in laughing at some of her peculiarities. More was not habitually given to sarcasm, especially on anything humbler or weaker than himself, but he had once or twice happened to be in the room when Miss Mann had made a call on his sister, and after listening to her conversation and viewing her features for a time, he had gone out into the garden where his little cousin was tending some of his favourite flowers, and while standing near and watching her, he had amused himself with comparing fair youth, delicate and attractive, with shriveled, eld, livid and loveless, and ingestingly repeating to a smiling girl the vinegar discourse of a cankered old maid. Once on such an occasion, Caroline had said to him, looking up from the luxuriant creeper she was binding to its frame, Ah, Robert, you do not like old maids, I too should come under the lash of your sarcasm if I were an old maid. You an old maid, he had replied, a peckant notion suggested by lips of that tinted form. I can fancy you, though, at forty, quietly dressed, pale and sunk, but still with that straight nose, white forehead and those soft eyes. I suppose, too, you will keep your voice, which has another timbre than that hard, deep organ of Miss Mann's. Judge Carey, even at fifty, you will not be repulsive. Miss Mann did not make herself or toon her voice, Robert. Nature made her in the mood which she makes briars and thorns, whereas for the creation of some women she reserves the main morning hours, when with light and dew she woos the primrose from the turf and the lily from the woodmoss. Assured into Miss Mann's little parlor, Caroline found her, as she always found her, surrounded by perfect neatness, cleanliness and comfort. After all, is it not a virtue in old maids that solitude rarely makes them negligent or disorderly? No dust on her polished furniture, not on her carpet, fresh flowers in the vase on her table, a bright fire in the great. She herself sat primly and somewhat grimly tidy in a cushioned rocking chair, her hands busy with some knitting. This was her favorite work, as it required the least exertion. She scarcely rose as Caroline entered. To avoid excitement was one of Miss Mann's aims in life. She had been composing herself ever since she came down in the morning, and had just attained a certain lethargic state of tranquility when the visitors knock at the door startled her, and undid her day's work. She was scarcely pleased, therefore, to see Miss Hellstone. She received her with reserve, made her be seated with austerity, and when she got her placed opposite, she fixed her with her eye. This was no ordinary doom to be fixed with Miss Mann's eye. Robert Moore had undergone it once and had never forgotten the circumstance. He considered it quite equal to anything Medusa could do. He professed to doubt whether, since that inflection, his flesh had been quite what it was before, whether there was not something stony in its texture. The gaze had had such an effect on him as to drive him promptly from the apartment and house. It had even sent him straight way up to the rectory, where he had appeared in Caroline's presence with a very queer face, and amazed her by demanding a cousinly salute on the spot to rectify a damage that had been done to him. Certainly Miss Mann had a formidable eye for one of the softer sex. It was prominent and showed a great deal of the white and looked as steadily as unwinkingly at you as if it were a steel ball soldered in her head. And when, while looking, she began to talk in an indescribably dry, monotonous tone, a tone without vibration or inflection, you felt as if a graven image of some bad spirit were addressing you. But it was all a figment of fancy, a matter of surface. Miss Mann's goblin grimness scarcely went deeper than the angel sweetness of hundreds of beauties. She was a perfectly honest, conscientious woman who had performed duties in her day from whose severe anguish many a human parry, gazelle-eyed, silken-tressed, and silver-tongued, would have shrunk appalled. She had passed alone through protracted scenes of suffering, exercised rigid self-denial, made large sacrifices of time, money, health, for those who had repaid her only by ingratitude, and now her main, almost her soul, fault, was that she was sensurious. Sensurious, she certainly was. Caroline had not sat five minutes ere her hostess, still keeping her under the spell of that dread and gorgon gaze, began flaying alive certain of the families of in the neighborhood. She went to work at this business in a singularly cool, deliberate manner, like some surgeon practicing with his scalpel on a lifeless subject. She made few distinctions. She allowed scarcely anyone to be good. She dissected impartially almost all her acquaintance. If her auditress ventured now and then to put in a palliative word, she set it aside with a certain disdain. Still, though thus pitiless in moral anatomy, she was no scandal-longer, she never disseminated really medlignant or dangerous reports. It was not her heart so much as her temper that was wrong. Caroline made this discovery for the first time today, and moved thereby to regret diverse, unjust judgments she had more than once passed on this crabbed old maid. She began to talk to her softly, not in sympathizing words, but with a sympathizing voice. The loneliness of her condition struck her visitor in a new light, as did also the character of her ugliness, a bloodless pallor of complexion, and deeply worn lines of feature. The girl pityed the solitary and afflicted woman. Her looks told what she felt. A sweet countenance is never so sweet as when the moved heart animates it with compassionate tenderness. Miss Mann, seeing such a countenance raised to her, was touched in her turn. She acknowledged her sense of the interest thus unexpectedly shown in her, who usually met with only coldness and ridicule by replying to her candidly. Communicative on her own affairs she usually was not, because no one cared to listen to her. But today she became so, and her confidant shed tears as she heard her speak, for she told of cruel, slow-wasting, obstinate sufferings. Well might she be corpse-like, well might she look grim and never smile, well might she wish to avoid excitement to gain and retain composure? Caroline, when she knew all, acknowledged that Miss Mann was rather to be admired for fortitude than blamed for moroseness. Reader, when you behold an aspect for whose constant gloom and frown you cannot account, whose unvarying cloud exasperates you by its apparent causelessness, be sure that there is a kink her somewhere, and a kink her not the less deeply corroding, because concealed. Miss Mann felt that she was understood partly, and wished to be understood further, for however old, plain, humble, desolate, afflicted we may be, so long as our hearts preserve the feeblest spark of life, they preserve also, shivering near that pale ember, a starved, ghostly longing for appreciation and affection. To this extenuated specter, perhaps, a crumb is not thrown once a year. But when a hungered and a thirst to famine, when all humanity has forgotten the dying tenant of a decaying house, divine mercy remembers the mourner, and a shower of mana falls for lips that earthly nutriment is to pass no more. Biblical promises, heard first in health, but then unheeded, come whispering to the couch of sickness. It is felt that a pitying God watches what all mankind have forsaken. The tender compassion of Jesus is recalled and relied on, the faded eye, gazing beyond time, sees a home, a friend, a refuge in eternity. Miss Mann, drawn on by the still attention of her listener, proceeded to allude to circumstances in her past life. She spoke like one who tells the truth, simply and with a certain reserve. She did not boast, nor did she exaggerate. Caroline found that the old maid had been a most devoted daughter and sister, an unwearyed watcher by lingering death beds, that had prolonged an unrelaxing attendance on the sick, the malady that now poisoned her own life owed its origin, that to one wretched relative she had been a support and sucker in the depths of self-earned degradation, and that it was still her hand which kept him from utter destitution. Miss Hellstone stayed the whole evening, omitting to pay her other intended visit, and when she left Miss Mann, it was with the determination to try in future to excuse her faults, never again to make light of her peculiarities or to laugh at her plainness, and above all things, not neglect her, but to come once a week and to offer her from one human heart at least, the homage of affection and respect, she felt she could now sincerely give her a small tribute of each feeling. Caroline, on her return, told Fanny she was very glad she had gone out, as she felt much better for the visit. The next day she failed not to seek Miss Aenly. This lady was in narrower circumstances than Miss Mann, and her dwelling was more humble. It was, however, if possible, yet more exquisitely clean, though the decayed gentlewoman could not afford to keep a servant, but waited on herself, and had only the occasional assistance of little girl who lived in a cottage near. Not only was Miss Aenly poorer, but she was even planer than the other old maid. In her first youth she must have been ugly. Now at the age of fifty she was very ugly. At first sight, all but peculiarly well-disciplined minds wrapped to turn from her with an annoyance, to conceive against her a prejudice simply on the ground of her unattractive look. Then she was prim and dress and manner. She looked, spoke, and moved the complete old maid. Her welcome to Caroline was formal, even in its kindness, for it was kind, but Miss Hellstone excused this. She knew something of the benevolence of the heart which beat under that starched kerchief, all the neighborhood, at least all the female neighborhood, knew something of it. No one spoke against Miss Aenly except lively young gentlemen, and inconsiderate old ones who declared her hideous. Caroline was soon at home in that tiny parlor, a kind hand took from her shawl and bonnet, and installed her in the most comfortable seat near the fire. The young and the antiquated woman were presently deep in kindly conversation, and soon Caroline became aware of the power of most serene, unselfish, and benignant mind could exercise over those to whom it was developed. She talked never of herself, always of others. Their faults she passed over, her theme was their wants, which she sought to supply, their sufferings which she longed to alleviate. She was religious, a professor of religion, what someone called a saint, and she referred to religion often in sanctioned phrase, in phrase which those who possess a perception of the ridiculous, without owning the power of exactly testing and truly judging character would certainly have esteemed a proper subject for satire, a matter for mimicry and laughter. They would have been hugely mistaken for their pains. Sincerity is never ludicrous, it is always respectable. Whether truth, be it religious or moral truth, speak eloquently and in well-chosen language or not, its voice should be heard with reverence. Let those who cannot nicely, and with certainty, discern the difference between the tones of hypocrisy and those of sincerity, never presume to laugh at all, lest they should have the miserable misfortune to laugh in the wrong place, and commit impiety when they think they are achieving wit. Not from Miss Ailey's own lips did Caroline hear of her good works, but she knew much of them nevertheless. Her beneficence was the familiar topic of the poor in Briarfield. They were not works of almsgiving, the old maid was too poor to give much, though she straightened herself to privation that she might contribute her might when needful. They were the works of a sister of charity, far more difficult to perform than those of a lady bountiful. She would watch by any sick bed, she seemed to fear no disease, she would nurse the poorest whom none else would nurse, she was serene, humble, kind, and equitable through everything. For this goodness she got but little reward in this life. Many of the poor became so accustomed to her services that they hardly thanked her for them. The rich heard them mentioned with wonder, but were silent, from a sense of shame at the difference between her sacrifices and their own. Many ladies, however, respected her deeply. They could not help it. One gentleman, only one, gave her his friendship and perfect confidence. This was Mr. Hall, the vicar of Nunnally. He said, and said truly, that her life came nearer the life of Christ than that of any other human being he had ever met with. You must not think, reader, that in sketching Miss Ailey's character I depict a figment of imagination. No, we seek the originals of such portraits in real life only. Miss Halston studied well the mind and heart now revealed to her. She found no high intellect to admire. The old maid was merely sensible, but she discovered so much goodness, so much usefulness, so much mildness, patience, truth, that she bent her own mind before Miss Ailey's irreverence. What was her love of nature? What was her sense of beauty? What were her more varied and fervent emotions? What was her deeper power of thought? What her wider capacity to comprehend compared to the practical excellence of this good woman? Momently, they seemed only beautiful forms of selfish delight. Mentally, she trod them underfoot. It is true, she still felt with pain, that the life which made Miss Ailey happy could not make her happy. Pure and active as it was, in her heart she deemed it deeply dreary because it was so loveless. To her ideas so forlorn. Yet doubtless she reflected, it needed only habit to make it practicable and agreeable to anyone. It was despicable, she felt, to pine sentimentally, to cherish secret griefs, vain memories, to be inert, to waste youth in aching langer, to grow old doing nothing. I will be stir myself, was her resolution, and try to be wise if I cannot be good. She proceeded to make inquiry of Miss Ailey if she could help her in anything. Miss Ailey, glad of an assistant, told her that she could and indicated some poor families in Briarfield that it was desirable she should visit, giving her likewise at her further request some work to do for certain poor women who had many children and who were unskilled in using the needle for themselves. Caroline went home, laid her plans, and took her resolve not to swerve from them. She allotted a certain portion of her time for her various studies and a certain portion for doing anything Miss Ailey might direct her to do. The remainder was to be spent and exercise. Not a moment was to be left for the indulgence of such fevered thoughts as had poisoned last Sunday evening. To do her justice she executed her plans conscientiously, perseveringly. It was very hard work at first. It was even hard work to the end. But it helped her to stem and keep down anguish. It forced her to be employed. It forbade her to brood, and gleams of satisfaction checkered her gray life here and there when she found she had done good, imparted pleasure, or allayed suffering. Yet I must speak truth. These efforts brought her neither health of body nor continued peace of mind. With them all she wasted grew more joyless and more wan. With them all her memory kept harping on the name of Robert Moore, an elegy over the past still run constantly in her ear. A funerial inward cry haunted and harassed her. The heaviness of a broken spirit and of pining and pulsing faculties settled slow on her buoyant youth. After seemed conquering her spring the mind's soil and its treasures were freezing gradually to barren stagnation. CHAPTER XI. Yet Caroline refused tamely to succumb. She had native strength in her girl's heart and she used it. Men and women never struggle so hard as when they struggle alone, without witness, counsellor, or confidant, unencouraged, unadvised, and unpittied. Miss Hellstone was in this position. Her sufferings were her only spur and being very real and sharp they roused her spirit keenly. Bent on victory over mortal pain she did her best to quell it. Never had she been so busy, so studious, and above all so active. She took walks in all weathers, long walks in solitary directions. Day by day she came back in the evening, pale and weary looking, yet seemingly not fatigued, for still as soon as she had thrown off her bonnet and shawl she would, instead of resting, begin to pace her apartment. Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint. She said she did this to tire herself well, that she might sleep soundly at night, but if that was her aim it was unattained, for at night when others slumbered she was tossing on her pillow, or sitting at the foot of her couch in the darkness, forgetful apparently of the necessity of seeking repose. Often unhappy girl she was crying, crying in a sort of intolerable despair which, when it rushed over her, smote down her strength and reduced her to childlike helplessness. When thus prostrate, temptations besieged her. Weak suggestions whispered in her weary heart to write to Robert and say that she was unhappy because she was forbidden to see him and Hortense, and that she feared he would withdraw his friendship, not love, from her, and forget her entirely, and begging him to remember her and sometimes to write to her. One or two such letters she actually indicted, but she never sent them, shame and good sense for bad. At last the life she led reached the point when it seemed she could bear it no longer, that she must seek and find a change somehow, or her heart and head would fail under the pressure which strained them. She longed to leave Briarfield, to go to some very distant place. She longed for something else, the deep secret anxious yearning to discover and know her mother strengthened daily, but with the desire was coupled a doubt, a dread, if she knew her, could she love her? There was cause for hesitation, for apprehension on this point. Never in her life had she heard that mother praised. Whoever mentioned her mentioned her coolly. Her uncle seemed to regard his sister-in-law with a sort of tacitantipathy. An old servant who had lived with Mrs. James Hellstone for a short time after her marriage, whenever she referred to her former mistress, spoke with chilling reserve. Sometimes she called her queer, sometimes she said she did not understand her. These expressions were ice to the daughter's heart. They suggested the conclusions that it was perhaps better never to know her parent than to know her and not like her. But one project she could frame, whose execution seemed likely to bring her a hope of relief. It was to take a situation, to be a governess, she could do nothing else. A little incident brought her to the point when she found courage to break her design to her uncle. Her long and late walks lay always, as has been said, on lonely roads, but in whatever direction she had rambled, whether along the drear skirts of still-brow moor, or over the sunny stretch of Nunnally Common, her homeward path was still so contrived as to lead her near the hollow. She rarely descended the den, but she visited its brink at twilight almost as regularly as the stars rose over the hill-crests. Her resting-place was at a certain style under a certain old thorn. Thence she could look down on the cottage, the mill, the dewy garden-ground, the still-deep dam. Thence was visible the well-known counting-house window, from whose panes at a fixed hour shot suddenly bright the ray of the well-known lamp. Her errand was to watch for this ray, her reward to catch it, sparkling bright and clear air, sometimes shimmering dim through mist, and a non-flashing broken between slant lines of rain, for she came in all weathers. There were nights when it failed to appear. She knew then that Robert was from home and went away doubly sad, whereas its kindling rendered her elate, as though she saw in it the promise of some indefinite hope. If while she gazed a shadow bent between the light and lattice her heart leaped, that eclipse was Robert. She had seen him. She would return home comforted, carrying in her mind a clearer vision of his aspect, a distinct recollection of his voice, his smile, his hearing. And, blunt with these impressions, was often a sweet persuasion that if she could get near him his heart might welcome her presence yet. That at this moment he might be willing to extend his hand and draw her to him and shelter her at his side as he used to do. That night, though she might weep as usual, she would fancy her tears less scalding. The pillow they watered seemed a little softer. The temples pressed to that pillow ached less. The shortest path from the hollow to the rectory wound near a certain mansion, the same under whose lone walls the Malone passed on that night journey mentioned in an early chapter of this work. The old and tenetless dwelling I klept fieldhead. Tenetless by the proprietor it had been for ten years, but it was no ruin. Mr. York had seen it kept in good repair, and an old gardener and his wife had lived in it, cultivated the grounds, and maintained the house in habitable condition. If fieldhead had few other merits as a building, it might at least be termed picturesque. Its irregular architecture and the gray and mossy coloring communicated by time gave it a just claim to this epithet. The old lattice windows, the stone porch, the walls, the roof, the chimney stacks, were rich in crayon touches and sepia lights and shades. The trees behind were fine, bold, and spreading. The cedar on the lawn in front was grand, and the granite urns on the garden wall, the fretted arch of the gateway, were for an artist as the very desire of the eye. One mild May evening Caroline passing near about moonrise and feeling the weary unwilling yet to go home, where there was only the bed of thorns and the night of grief to anticipate. That down on the mossy ground near the gate and gazed through towards cedar and mansion. It was a still night, calm, dewy, cloudless. The gables turned to the west, reflected the clear amber of the horizon they faced. The oaks behind were black, the cedar was blacker, under its dense raven boughs a glimpse of sky opened gravely blue. It was full of the moon which looked solemnly and mildly down on Caroline from beneath that somber canopy. She felt this night and prospect mournfully lovely. She wished she could be happy. She wished she could know inward peace. She wondered Providence had no pity on her and would not help or console her. Recollections of happy trists of lovers commemorated in old ballads returned on her mind. She thought such trist in such scene would be blissful. Where now was Robert, she asked? Not at the hollow. She had watched for his lamp long and had not seen it. She questioned within herself whether she and Moore were ever destined to meet and speak again. Suddenly the door within the stone porch of the hall opened and two men came out. One elderly and white-headed, the other young, dark-haired and tall. They passed across the lawn out through a portal in the garden wall. Caroline saw them cross the road, pass the style, descend the fields. She saw them disappear. Robert Moore had passed before her with his friend Mr. York. Neither had seen her. The apparition had been transient, scarce seen ere gone, but its electric passage left her veins kindled, her soul insurgent. It found her despairing, it left her desperate, two different states. Oh, had he but been alone, had he but seen me was her cry, he would have said something, he would have given me his hand. He does, he must love me a little. He would have shown some token of affection in his eye on his lips I should have read comfort, but the chance is lost. The wind, the clouds' shadow, does not pass more silently, more emptily than he. I have been mocked, and heaven is cruel. Thus in the utter sickness of longing and disappointment she went home. The next morning at breakfast when she appeared white-cheeked and miserable looking as one who had seen a ghost, she inquired of Mr. Hellstone. Have you any objection, Uncle, to my inquiring for a situation in a family? Her Uncle, ignorant as the table supporting his coffee-cup of all his niece had undergone and was undergoing, scarcely believed his ears. What whim now, he asked? Are you bewitched? What can you mean? I am not well and need a change, she said. He examined her. He discovered she had experienced a change at any rate. Without his being aware of it the rose had dwindled and faded to a mere snow-drop. Bloom had vanished, flesh wasted. She sat before him drooping, colourless and thin. But for the soft expression of her brown eyes, the delicate lines of her features, and the flowing abundance of her hair, she would no longer have possessed a claim to the epithet, pretty. What on earth is the matter with you, he asked? What is wrong? How are you ailing? No answer. Only the brown eyes filled, the faintly tinted lips trembled. Look out for a situation indeed. For what situation are you fit? What have you been doing with yourself? You are not well. I should be well if I went from home. These women are incomprehensible. They have the strangest knack of startling you with unpleasant surprises. Today you see them bouncing, buxom, red as cherries and round as apples. To-morrow they exhibit themselves, effete as dead weeds, blanched and broken down. And the reason of it all, that's the puzzle. She has her meals, her liberty, a good house to live in, and good clothes to wear, as usual. A while since, that's sufficed to keep her handsome and cheery, and there she sits now, a poor little pale-puling chit-enough, provoking. Then comes the question, what is to be done? I suppose I must send for advice. Will you have a doctor-child? No, uncle, I don't want one. A doctor could do me no good. I merely want change of air and scene. Well if that be the caprice that shall be gratified, you shall go to a watering-place, I don't mind the expense, fanny shall accompany you. But uncle, some day I must do something for myself. I have no fortune. I had better begin now. While I live you shall not turn out as a governess, Caroline. I will not have it said that my niece is a governess. But the later in life one makes a change of that sort, uncle, the more difficult and painful it is. I should wish to get accustomed to the yoke before any habits of ease and independence are formed. I beg you will not harass me, Caroline. I mean to provide for you. I have always meant to provide for you. I will purchase an annuity. Bless me, I am but fifty-five. My health and constitution are excellent. There is plenty of time to save and take measures. Don't make yourself anxious respecting the future. Is that what frets you? No, uncle, but I long for a change. He laughed. There speaks the woman cried he, the very woman. A change, a change. Always fantastical and whimsical. Well it's in her sex. But it is not fantasy and whim, uncle. What is it then? Necessity, I think. I feel weaker than formerly. I believe I should have more to do. Admirable, she feels weak and therefore she should be set to hard labour. Claire, come le jour, as more. Confound more. You shall go to Cliffbridge, and there are two guineas to buy a new frock. Come, Carrie, never fear. We'll find balm in Gilead. Uncle, I wish you were less generous and more. More what? Sympathising was the word on Caroline's lips, but it was not uttered. She checked herself in time. Her uncle would indeed have laughed if that namby-pamby word had escaped her. Finding her silent, he said, the fact is you don't know precisely what you want. Only to be a governess. Poo! Mere nonsense. I'll not hear of governessing. Don't mention it again. It is rather too feminine a fancy. I have finished breakfast, ring the bell, put all crotchets out of your head, and run away and amuse yourself. What with, my doll, asked Caroline to herself as she quitted the room? A week or two passed. Her bodily and mental health neither grew worse nor better. She was now precisely in that state when, if her constitution had contained the seeds of consumption, decline, or slow fever, those diseases would have been rapidly developed and would soon have carried her quietly from the world. People never die of love or grief alone, though some die of inherent maladies which the tortures of those passions prematurely force into destructive action. The sound by nature undergo these tortures, and are wracked, shaken, shattered. Their beauty and bloom perish, but life remains untouched. They are brought to a certain point of dilapidation. They are reduced to pallor, debility, and emaciation. People think as they see them gliding languidly about that they will soon withdraw to sick beds, perish there, and cease from among the healthy and happy. This does not happen. They live on, and though they cannot regain youth and gaiety, they may regain strength and serenity. The blossom which the march wind nips but fails to sweep away may survive to hang a withered apple on the tree late into autumn. Having braved the last frosts of spring, it may also brave the first of winter. Everyone noticed the change in Miss Hellstone's appearance, and most people said she was going to die. She never thought so herself. She felt in no dying case. She hadn't either pain nor sickness. Her appetite was diminished. She knew the reason. It was because she wept so much at night. Her strength was lessened. She could account for it. Sleep was coy and hard to be won. Dreams were distressing and baleful. In the far future she still seemed to anticipate a time when this passage of misery should be got over, and when she should once more be calm, though perhaps never again happy. Meanwhile, her uncle urged her to visit, to comply with the frequent invitations of their acquaintance. This she evaded doing. She could not be cheerful in company. She felt she was observed there with more curiosity than sympathy. Old ladies were always offering her their advice, recommending this or that nostrum. Young ladies looked at her in a way she understood and from which she shrank. Their eyes said they knew she had been disappointed as custom phrases it, by whom they were not certain. Commonplace young ladies can be quite as hard as commonplace young gentlemen, quite as worldly and selfish. Those who suffer should always avoid them, grief and calamity they despise. They seemed to regard them as the judgments of God on the lowly. With them, to love, is merely to contrive a scheme for achieving a good match. To be disappointed is to have their scheme seen through and frustrated. They think the feelings and projects of others on the subject of love similar to their own, and judge them accordingly. All this Caroline knew partly by instinct, partly by observation. She regulated her conduct by her knowledge, keeping her pale face and wasted figure as much out of sight as she could. Living thus in complete seclusion, she ceased to receive intelligence of the little transactions of the neighborhood. One morning her uncle came into the parlor where she sat endeavouring to find some pleasure in painting a little group of wildflowers gathered under a hedge at the top of the hollow fields. And said to her in his abrupt manner, Come, child, you are always stooping over pallet or book or sampler. Leave that tinting work. By the by do you put your pencil to your lips when you paint? Sometimes, uncle, when I forget. Then it is that which is poisoning you. The paints are deleterious, child. There is white lead and red lead and ver-degree and gamboge and twenty other poisons in those color cakes. Lock them up, lock them up. Get your bonnet on. I want you to make a call with me. With you, uncle? This question was asked in a tone of surprise. She was not accustomed to make calls with her uncle. She never rode or walked out with him on any occasion. Quick, quick, I am always busy, you know. I have no time to lose. She hurriedly gathered up her materials, asking, meantime, where they were going. To Fieldhead. Fieldhead, what, to see old James Booth, the gardener, is he ill? We are going to see Miss Shirley Kildar. Miss Kildar, is she come to Yorkshire? Is she at Fieldhead? She is. She has been there a week. I met her at a party last night, that party to which you would not go. I was pleased with her. I choose that you shall make her acquaintance. It will do you good. She is now come of age, I suppose. She is come of age, and will reside for a time on her property. I lectured her on the subject. I showed her her duty. She is not intractable. She is rather a fine girl. She will teach you what it is to have a sprightly spirit. Nothing lackadaisical about her. I don't think she will want to see me or to have me introduced to her. What good can I do her? How can I amuse her? Pasha, put your bonnet on. Is she proud, uncle? Don't know. You hardly imagine she would show her pride to me, I suppose. A chit like that would scarcely presume to give herself heirs with the rector of her parish, however rich she might be. No, but how did she behave to other people? Didn't observe. She holds her head high and probably can be saucy enough where she dare. She wouldn't be a woman otherwise. There, away now for your bonnet at once. Not naturally very confident, a failure of physical strength and a depression of spirits had not tended to increase Caroline's presence of mind and ease of manner or to give her additional courage to face strangers, and she quailed in spite of self-remonstrance as she and her uncle walked up the broad paved approach leading from the gateway of field-head to its porch. She followed Mr. Hellstone reluctantly through that porch into the sombre old vestibule beyond. End of Chapter 11 Part 1 Chapter 11 Part 2 of Shirley This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Shirley by Charlotte Bronte. Chapter 11 Field Head Part 2 Very sombre it was, long, vast, and dark. One lattice window lidded but dimly, the wide old chimney contained now no fire for the present warm weather needed it not. It was filled instead with willow boughs. The gallery on high opposite the entrance was seen but in outline so shadowy became this hall towards its ceiling. Carved stag's heads, with real antlers, looked down grotesquely from the walls. This was neither a grand nor a comfortable house, within as without it was antique, rambling, and incomodious. A property of a thousand a year belonged to it which property had descended for lack of male heirs on a female. There were mercantile families in the district boasting twice the income but the keel-dars by virtue of their antiquity and their distinction of lords of the manner took the precedence of all. Mr. and Miss Hellstone were ushered into a parlor, of course as was to be expected in such a gothic gold barrack this parlor was lined with oak. Fine dark glossy panels compassed the walls gloomily and grandly. Very handsome reader these shining brown panels are, very mellow in coloring and tasteful in effect, but if you know what a spring clean is, very excruble and inhuman. However having the bowels of humanity has seen servants scrubbing at these polished wooden walls with beeswaxed cloths on a warm May day must allow that they are intolerable and not to be endured. And I cannot but secretly applaud the benevolent barbarian who had painted another and larger apartment of field head, the drawing-room to wit, formerly also an oak-room, of a delicate pinky white, whereby earning for himself the character of a hun, but mightily enhancing the cheerfulness of that portion of his abode and saving future housemaids a world of toil. The brown-paneled parlor was furnished all in old style and with real old furniture. On each side of the high mantelpiece stood two antique chairs of oak, solid as silvan thrones, and in one of these sat a lady. But if this were Miss Kildar she must have come of age at least some twenty years ago. She was of matronly form, and though she wore no cap and possessed hair of quite an undimmed, auburn shading, small and naturally young-looking features, she had no youthful aspect, nor apparently the wish to assume it. You could have wished her attire of a newer fashion. In a well-cut, well-made gown hers would have been no uncomely presence. It puzzled you to guess why a garment of handsome materials should be arranged in such scanty folds and devised after such an obsolete mode. You felt disposed to set down the wearer as somewhat eccentric at once. This lady received the visitors with a mixture of ceremony and diffidence quite English. No middle-aged matron, who was not an English woman, could evince precisely the same manner, a manner so uncertain of herself, of her own merits, of her power to please, and yet so anxious to be proper and, if possible, rather agreeable than otherwise. In the present instance, however, more embarrassment was shown than is usual even with diffident English women. Miss Halston felt this, sympathized with the stranger, and knowing by experience what was good for the timid, took a seat quietly near her and began to talk to her with a gentle ease, communicated for the moment by the presence of one less self-possessed than herself. She and this lady would, if alone, have at once got on extremely well together. The lady had the clearest voice imaginable, infinitely softer and more tuneful than could have been reasonably expected from forty years, and a form decidedly inclined to embon-point. This voice Caroline liked. It atoned for the formal, if correct, accent and language. The lady would soon have discovered she liked it and her, and in ten minutes they would have been friends. But Mr. Halston stood on the rug looking at them both, looking especially at the strange lady with his sarcastic keen eye that clearly expressed impatience of her chilly ceremony and annoyance at her want of aplomb. His hard gaze and rasping voice discomfited the lady more and more. She tried, however, to get up little speeches about the weather, the aspect of the country, et cetera, but the impracticable Mr. Halston presently found himself somewhat deaf. Whatever she said he affected not to hear distinctly, and she was obliged to go over each elaborately constructed nothing twice. The effort soon became too much for her. She was just rising in a perplexed flutter, nervously murmuring that she knew not what detained Miss Kildar that she would go and look for her when Miss Kildar saved her the trouble by appearing. It was to be presumed, at least, that she who now came in through a glass door from the garden owned that name. There is real grace in ease of manner, and so old Halston felt when an erect, slight girl walked up to him, retaining with her left hand her little silk apron full of flowers, and giving him her right hand, said pleasantly, I knew you would come to see me, though you do think Mr. York has made me a Jacobin. Good morning. But we'll not have you a Jacobin, returned he. No, Miss Shirley, they shall not steal the flower of my parish from me. Now that you are amongst us, you shall be my pupil in politics and religion. I'll teach you sound doctrine on both points. Mrs. Pryor has anticipated you, she replied, turning to the elder lady. Mrs. Pryor, you know, is my governess, and is still my friend, and of all the high and rigid Tories, she is queen. Of all the staunch Church women, she is chief. I have been well-drilled, both in theology and history, I assure you, Mr. Halston. The rector immediately bowed very low to Mrs. Pryor, and expressed himself obliged to her. The ex-governess disclaimed skill, either in political or religious controversy, explained that she thought such matters little adapted for female minds, but about herself in general terms the advocate of order and loyalty and, of course, truly attached to the establishment. She added she was ever averse to change under any circumstances, and something scarcely audible about the extreme danger of being too ready to take up new ideas closed her sentence. Miss Kildar thinks as you think, I hope, madam. Opinions of age and difference of temperament occasion difference of sentiment, was the reply. It can scarcely be expected that the eager and young should hold the opinions of the cool and middle-aged. Oh, oh, we are independent, we think for ourselves, cried Mr. Halston. We are a little Jacobin for anything I know, a little free thinker in good earnest. Let us have a confession of faith on the spot. And he took the heiress's two hands, causing her to let fall her whole cargo of flowers, and seated her by him on the sofa. Say your creed, he ordered. The apostles creed? Yes, she said it like a child. And now for St. Athanasius's, that's the test. Let me gather up my flowers, here is Tartar coming, he will tread upon them. There was a rather large, strong and fierce-looking dog, very ugly, being of a breed between mass-defend bulldog, who at this moment entered through the glass door and, posting directly to the rug, snuffed the fresh flowers scattered there. He seemed to scorn them as food, but probably thinking their velvety petals might be convenient as litter, he was turning round preparatory to depositing his tawny bulk upon them, when Miss Helstone and Miss Kildar simultaneously stooped to the rescue. Thank you, said the heiress, as she again held out her little apron for Caroline to heap the blossoms into it. Is this your daughter, Mr. Helstone, she asked? My niece, Caroline. Miss Kildar shook hands with her and then looked at her. Caroline also looked at her hostess. Miss Kildar, she had no Christian name but Shirley, her parents who had wished to have a son, finding that, after eight years of marriage, Providence had granted them only a daughter, bestowed on her the same masculine family cognomen they would have bestowed on a boy if with a boy they had been blessed. Shirley Kildar was no ugly heiress, she was agreeable to the eye. Her height and shape were not unlike Miss Helstone's. Perhaps in stature she might have the advantage by an inch or two. She was gracefully made and her face, too, possessed a charm as well described by the word grace as any other. It was pale naturally, but intelligent and a varied expression. She was not a blonde like Caroline. Clear and dark were the characteristics of her aspect as to color. Her face and brow were clear, her eyes of the darkest gray, no green lights in them, transparent, pure, natural gray, and her hair of the darkest brown. Her features were distinguished by which I do not mean that they were high, bony and Roman, being indeed rather small and slightly marked than otherwise, but only that they were to use a few French words, fin, gracieux, spirituelle. Noble they were, and speaking, but their changes were not to be understood nor their language interpreted all at once. She examined Caroline seriously, inclining her head a little to one side with a thoughtful air. You see she is only a feeble chick, observed Mr. Helstone. She looks young, younger than I. How old are you, she inquired, in a manner that would have been patronizing if it had not been extremely solemn and simple. Eighteen years and six months. And I am twenty-one. She said no more, she had now placed her flowers on the table and was busyed in arranging them. And St. Athanasius's creed urged the rector, you believe it all, don't you? I can't remember it quite all. I will give you a nose-gay, Mr. Helstone, when I have given your niece one. She had selected a little bouquet of one brilliant and two or three delicate flowers, relieved by a spray of dark verger. She tied it with silk from her work-box and placed it on Caroline's lap. And then she put her hands behind her and stood bending slightly towards her guest, still regarding her in the attitude and with something of the aspect of a grave but gallant little cavalier. This temporary expression of face was aided by the style in which she wore her hair, parted on one temple, and brushed in a glossy sweep above the forehead whence it fell in curls that looked natural, so free were their wavy undulations. Are you tired with your walk, she inquired? No, not in the least it is but a short distance, but a mile. You look pale. Is she always so pale, she asked, turning to the rector? She used to be as rosy as the reddest of your flowers. Why is she altered? What has made her pale? Has she been ill? She tells me she wants a change. She ought to have one. You ought to give her one. You should send her to the sea-coast. I will, air summer is over. Meantime I intend her to make acquaintance with you if you have no objection. I am sure Miss Kildar will have no objection, here observed Mrs. Pryor. I think I may take it upon me to say that Miss Hellstone's frequent presence at Fieldhead will be esteemed a favour. You speak my sentiments precisely, ma'am, said Shirley, and I thank you for anticipating me. Let me tell you, she continued, turning to Caroline, that you also ought to thank my governess. It is not everyone she would welcome as she has welcomed you. You are distinguished more than you think. This morning, as soon as you are gone, I shall ask Mrs. Pryor's opinion of you. I am apt to rely on her judgment of character, for hitherto I have found it wondrous accurate. Already I foresee a favourable answer to my inquiries. Do I not guess rightly, Mrs. Pryor? My dear, you said but now you would ask my opinion when Miss Hellstone was gone. I am scarcely likely to give it in her presence. No, and perhaps it will be long enough before I obtain it. I am sometimes sadly tantalised, Mr. Hellstone, by Mrs. Pryor's extreme caution. Her judgments ought to be correct when they come, for they are often as tardy of delivery as a Lord Chancellor's. On some people's characters I cannot get her to pronounce sentence and treat as I may. Mrs. Pryor here smiled. Yes, said her pupil, I know what that smile means. You are thinking of my gentleman tenant. Do you know Mr. Moore of the Hollow, she asked, Mr. Hellstone? I, I, your tenant, so he is. You have seen a good deal of him, no doubt, since you came. I have been obliged to see him. There was business to transact. Business? Really the word makes me conscious. I am indeed no longer a girl, but quite a woman and something more. I am an Esquire. Shirley Kildar Esquire ought to be my style and title. They gave me a man's name. I hold a man's position. It is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood, and when I see such people as that stately Anglo-Belgian, that Gerard Moore before me, gravely talking to me of business, really I feel quite gentleman-like. You must choose me for your churchwarden, Mr. Hellstone, the next time you elect new ones. They ought to make me a magistrate and a captain of yeomanry. Tony Lumpkin's mother was a colonel and his aunt a justice of the peace. Why shouldn't I be? With all my heart, if you choose to get up a requisition on the subject, I promise to head the list of signatures with my name. But you are speaking of Mr. Moore. Ah, yes, I find it a little difficult to understand Mr. Moore, to know what to think of him, whether to like him or not. He seems a tenant of whom any proprietor might be proud, and proud of him I am, in that sense. But as a neighbor, what is he? Again and again I have entreated Mrs. Pryor to say what she thinks of him, but she still evades returning a direct answer. I hope you will be less oracular, Mr. Hellstone, and pronounce at once. Do you like him? Not at all, just now. His name is entirely blotted from my good books. What is the matter? What has he done? My uncle and he disagree on politics, interposed the low voice of Caroline. She had better not have spoken just then. Having scarcely joined in the conversation before, it was not apropos to do it now. She felt this with nervous acuteness as soon as she had spoken and coloured to the eyes. What are Moore's politics, inquired Shirley? Those of a tradesman returned the rector, narrow, selfish and unpatriotic. The man is eternally writing and speaking against the continuance of the war. I have no patience with him. The war hurts his trade. I remember he remarked that only yesterday. But what other objection have you to him? That is enough. He looks the gentleman in my sense of the term pursued Shirley and it pleases me to think he is such. Then rent the Tyrian petals of the one brilliant flower in her bouquet and answered in distinct tones, decidedly he is. Shirley, hearing this courageous affirmation, flashed an arch searching glance at the speaker from her deep expressive eyes. You are his friend at any rate, she said. You defend him in his absence. I am both his friend and his relative, was the prompt reply. Robert Moore is my cousin. Oh, then you can tell me all about him. Just give me a sketch of his character. In superable embarrassment seized Caroline when this demand was made. She could not and did not attempt to comply with it. Her silence was immediately covered by Mrs. Pryor, who proceeded to address sundry questions to Mr. Hellstone regarding a family or two in the neighborhood, with whose connections in the south she said she was acquainted. Shirley soon withdrew her gaze from Miss Hellstone's face. She did not renew her interrogations, but returning to her flowers proceeded to choose a nose-gay for the rector. She presented it to him as he took leave and received the homage of a salute on the hand in return. Be sure you wear it for my sake, said she. Next, my heart, of course, responded Hellstone. Mrs. Pryor, take care of this future magistrate, this churchwarden in perspective, this captain of yeomanry, this young squire of brier field. In a word, don't let him exert himself too much. Don't let him break his neck in hunting. Especially let him mind how he rides down that dangerous hill near the hollow. I like a descent, said Shirley. I like to clear it rapidly, and especially I like that romantic hollow with all my heart. Romantic with a mill in it? Romantic with a mill in it. The old mill and the white cottage are each admirable in its way. And the counting-house, Mr. Kildar? The counting-house is better than my bloom-colored drawing-room. I adore the counting-house. And the trade, the cloth, the greasy wool, the polluting dying-vats? The trade is to be thoroughly respected. And the tradesman is a hero—good. I'm glad to hear you say so. I thought the tradesman looked heroic. Mischief, spirit, and glee sparkled all over her face as she thus bandied words with the old Cossack, who almost equally enjoyed the tilt. Captain Kildar, you have no mercantile blood in your veins. Why are you so fond of trade? Because I am a mill-owner, of course. Half my income comes from the works in that hollow. Don't enter into partnership, that's all. You've put it into my head. You've put it into my head, she exclaimed, with a joyous laugh. It will never get out. Thank you! And waving her hand, white as a lily and fine as a fairies, she vanished within the porch, while the rector and his niece passed out through the arched gateway. End of CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHERLEY and CAROLINE Shirley showed she had been sincere in saying she should be glad of Caroline's society by frequently seeking it, and indeed if she had not sought it she would not have had it, for Miss Hellstone was slow to make fresh acquaintance. She was always held back by the idea that people could not want her, that she could not amuse them, and a brilliant, happy, youthful creature like the heiress of Fieldhead seemed to her too completely independent of society so uninteresting as hers ever to find it really welcome. Shirley might be brilliant and probably happy likewise, but no one is independent of genial society, and though in about a month she had made the acquaintance of most of the family's round, and was on quite free and easy terms with all the Mrs. Sykes and all the Mrs. Pearson and the two superlative Mrs. Wynn of Walden Hall, yet it appeared she found none amongst them very genial. She fraternized with none of them to use her own words. If she had had the bliss to be really Shirley Kildar Esquire, Lord of the Manor of Briarfield, there was not a single fair one in this and the two neighbouring parishes whom she should have felt disposed to request to become Mrs. Kildar, Lady of the Manor. This declaration she made to Mrs. Pryor, who received it very quietly as she did most of her pupil's offhand speeches, responding, My dear, do not allow that habit of alluding to yourself as a gentleman to be confirmed. It is a strange one. Those who do not know you, hearing you speak thus, would think you affected masculine manners. Shirley never laughed at her former governess, even the little formalities and harmless peculiarities of that lady were respectable in her eyes. Had it been otherwise she would have proved herself a weak character at once, for it is only the weak who make a butt of quiet worth. Therefore she took her remonstrance in silence. She stood quietly near the window, looking at the grand cedar on her lawn, watching a bird on one of its lower boughs. Presently she began to chirp to the bird. Soon her chirp grew clearer. Airlong she was whistling. The whistle struck into a tune, and very sweetly and deftly it was executed. My dear, expostulated Mrs. Pryor, was I whistling, said Shirley? I forgot. I beg your pardon, ma'am. I had resolved to take care not to whistle before you. But Miss Kildar, where did you learn to whistle? You must have got the habit since you came down into Yorkshire. I never knew you guilty of it before. Oh, I learned to whistle a long while ago. Who taught you? No one. I took it up by listening, and I had laid it down again. But lately, yesterday evening, as I was coming up our lane, I heard a gentleman whistling that very tune in the field on the other side of the hedge, and that reminded me. What gentleman was it? We have only one gentleman in this region, ma'am, and that is Mr. Moore. At least he is the only gentleman who is not gray-haired. My two venerable favourites, Mr. Hellstone and Mr. York, it is true, are fine old bows, infinitely better than any of the stupid young ones. His prior was silent. You do not like Mr. Hellstone, ma'am? My dear, Mr. Hellstone's office secures him from criticism. You generally contrive to leave the room when he is announced. Do you walk out this morning, my dear? Yes, I shall go to the rectory and seek and find Caroline Hellstone and make her take some exercise. We shall have a breezy walk over Nunnally Common. If you go in that direction, my dear, have the goodness to remind Ms. Hellstone to wrap up well, as there is a fresh wind, and she appears to me to require care. You shall be my neutrally obeyed, Mrs. Pryor. Meantime will you not accompany us yourself? No, my love, I should be a restraint upon you. I am stout and cannot walk so quickly as you would wish to do. Shirley easily persuaded Caroline to go with her, and when they were fairly out on the quiet road traversing the extensive and solitary sweep of Nunnally Common, she as easily drew her into conversation. The first feelings of diffidence overcome, Caroline soon felt glad to talk with Ms. Kildar. The very first interchange of slight observations, sufficed to give each an idea of what the other was. Shirley said she liked the green sweep of the Common Turf, and, better still, the heath on its ridges, for the heath reminded her of moors. She had seen moors when she was travelling on the borders near Scotland. She remembered particularly a district traversed one long afternoon on a sultry but sunless day in summer. They journeyed from noon till sunset over what seemed a boundless waste of deep heath, and nothing had they seen but wild sheep, nothing heard but the cries of wild birds. I know how the heath would look on such a day, said Caroline. Purple black, a deeper shade of the sky tint, and that would be livid. Yes, quite livid, with brassy edges to the clouds, and here and there a white gleam, more ghastly than the lurid tinge, which as you looked at it you momentarily expected would kindle into blinding lightning. Did it thunder? It muttered distant peals, but the storm did not break till evening after we had reached our inn, that inn being an isolated house at the foot of a range of mountains. Did you watch the clouds come down over the mountains? I did. I stood at the window an hour watching them. The hills seemed rolled in a sullen mist. And when the rain fell in whitening sheets, suddenly they were blotted from the prospect, they were washed from the world. I have seen such storms in hilly districts in Yorkshire, and at their riotous climax while the sky was all cataract, the earth all flood, I have remembered the deluge. It is singularly reviving after such hurricanes to feel calm return, and from the opening clouds to receive the consolatory gleam, softly testifying that the sun is not quenched. Miss Kildar, just stand still now and look down at nunnally dale and wood. They both halted on the green brow of the common. They looked down on the deep valley, robed in may-raiment, on varied meads, some purled with daisies, and some golden with king-cups. May all this young verger smiled clear in sunlight, transparent emerald and amber gleams played over it. On nunnwood the sole remnant of antique British forest in a region whose lowlands were once all silven chase, as its highlands were breast-deep heather, slept the shadow of a cloud. The distant hills were dappled, the horizon was shaded and tinted like mother of pearl, silvery blues, soft purples, evanescent greens, and rose shades, all melting into fleeces of white cloud, pure as azury snow, allured the eye as with a remote glimpse of heaven's foundations. The air blowing on the brow was fresh and sweet and bracing. Our England is a bonny island, said Shirley, and Yorkshire is one of her bonniest nooks. You are a Yorkshire girl, too? I am Yorkshire in blood and birth, five generations of my race sleep under the aisles of Briarfield Church. I drew my first breath in the old black hall behind us. Hereupon Caroline presented her hand which was accordingly taken and shaken. We are compatriots, said she. Yes, agreed Shirley, with a grave nod. Was that, asked Miss Kildar, pointing to the forest, that is Nunwood? It is. Were you ever there? Many a time. In the heart of it? Yes. What is it like? It is like an encampment of forest suns of a knock. The trees are huge and old. When you stand at their roots the summits seem in another region the trunks remain still and firm as pillars while the boughs sway to every breeze. In the deepest calm their leaves are never quite hushed and in high wind a flood rushes, a sea thunders above you. Was it not one of Robin Hood's haunts? Yes, and there are mementos of him still existing. To penetrate into Nunwood, Miss Kildar, is to go far back into the dim days of old. Can you see a break in the forest about the center? Yes, distinctly. That break is a dell, a deep hollow cup lined with turf as green and short as the sod of this common. The very oldest of the trees, gnarled mighty oaks, crowd about the brink of this dell. In the bottom lie the ruins of a nunnery. We will go, you and I alone, Caroline, to that wood early some fine summer morning and spend a long day there. We can take pencils and sketchbooks and any interesting reading book we like. And of course we shall take something to eat. I have two little baskets in which Mrs. Gill, my housekeeper, might pack our provisions, and we could each carry our own. It would not tire you too much to walk so far? Oh, no, especially if we rested the whole day in the wood, and I know all the pleasantest spots. I know where we could get nuts in nutting time. I know where wild strawberries abound. I know certain lonely, quite untrodden glades, carpeted with strange mosses, some yellow as if gilded, some a somber gray, some gem green. I know groups of trees that ravish the eye with their perfect picture-like effects, rude oak, delicate birch, glossy beech, clustered in contrast, and ash trees, stately as sol, standing isolated, and superannuated wood giants clad in bright shrouds of ivy. Miss Kildar, I could guide you. You would be dull with me alone? I should think not. I think we should suit. And what third person is there whose presence would not spoil our pleasure? Indeed, I know of none about our own ages, no lady at least, and as to gentlemen. An excursion becomes quite a different thing when there are gentlemen of the party interrupted Caroline. I agree with you, quite a different thing to what we are proposing. We are going simply to see the old trees, the old ruins, to pass a day in old times surrounded by olden silence and above all by quietude. You are right, and the presence of gentlemen dispels the last charm, I think. If they are of the wrong sort, like your Malones and your young Sykeses and Wins, irritation takes the place of serenity. If they are of the right sort, there is still a change. I can hardly tell what change, one easy to feel, difficult to describe. We forget nature in premise, and then nature forgets us, covers her vast calm brow with a dim veil, conceals her face and withdraws the peaceful joy with which, if we had been content to worship her only, she would have filled our hearts. What does she give us instead? More elation and more anxiety, an excitement that steals the hours away fast and a trouble that ruffles their course. Our power of being happy lies a good deal in ourselves, I believe, remarked Caroline Sagely. I have gone to Nunwood with a large party, all the curates and some other gentry of these parts, together with sundry ladies, and I found the affair insufferably tedious and absurd. And I have gone quite alone or accompanied but by Thani, who sat in the woodman's hut and sowed or talked to the good wife, while I roamed about and made sketches or read, and I have enjoyed much happiness of a quiet kind all day long, but that was when I was young, two years ago. Did you ever go with your cousin, Robert Moore? Yes, once. What sort of a companion is he on these occasions? A cousin, you know, is different to a stranger. I am aware of that, but cousins, if they are stupid, are still more insupportable than strangers, because you cannot so easily keep them at a distance. But your cousin is not stupid? No, but... Well, if the company of fools irritates, as you say, the society of clever men leaves its own peculiar pain also, where the goodness or talent of your friend is beyond and above all doubt, your own worthiness to be his associate often becomes a matter of question. Oh, there I cannot follow you. That crotchet is not one I should choose to entertain for an instant. I consider myself not unworthy to be the associate of the best of them, of gentleman I mean, though that is saying a great deal. Where they are good, they are very good, I believe. Your uncle, by the by, is not a bad specimen of the elderly gentleman. I am always glad to see his brown, keen, sensible old face, either in my own house or any other. Are you fond of him? Is he kind to you? Now speak the truth. He has brought me up from childhood, I doubt not, precisely as he would have brought up his own daughter if he had had one, and that is kindness, but I am not fond of him. I would rather be out of his presence than in it. Strange when he has the art of making himself so agreeable. Yes, in company, but he is stern and silent at home. As he puts away his cane and shovel hat in the rectory hall, so he locks his liveliness in his bookcase and study desk, the knitted brow and brief word for the fireside, the smile, the jest, the witty sally for society. Is he tyrannical? Not in the least, he is neither tyrannical nor hypocritical, he is simply a man who is rather liberal than good-natured, rather brilliant than genial, rather scrupulously equitable than truly jest if you can understand such superfine distinctions. Oh yes, good nature implies indulgence which he has not, geniality warmth of heart which he does not own, and genuine justice is the offspring of sympathy and considerateness of which I can well conceive, my bronzed old friend is quite innocent. I often wonder surely whether most men resemble my uncle in their domestic relations, whether it is necessary to be new and unfamiliar to them in order to seem agreeable or estimable in their eyes, and whether it is impossible to their natures to retain a constant interest and affection for those they see every day. I don't know, I can't clear up your doubts. I ponder over similar ones myself sometimes. But to tell you a secret if I were convinced that they were necessarily and universally different from us, fickle, soon petrifying, unsympathizing, I would never marry. I should not like to find out that what I loved did not love me, that it was weary of me, and that whatever effort I might make to please would hereafter be worse than useless since it was inevitably in its nature to change and become indifferent. That discovery once made, what should I long for? To go away, to remove from a presence where my society gave no pleasure. But you could not if you were married. No, I could not, there it is. I could never be my own mistress more. A terrible thought, it suffocates me. Nothing irks me like the idea of being a burden and a bore, an inevitable burden, a ceaseless bore. Now when I feel my company superfluous, I can comfortably fold my independence round me like a mantle and drop my pride like a veil and withdraw to solitude, if married that could not be. I wonder we don't all make up our minds to remain single, said Caroline. We should if we listened to the wisdom of experience. My uncle always speaks of marriage as a burden and I believe whenever he hears of a man being married he invariably regards him as a fool or at any rate as doing a foolish thing. But Caroline, men are not all like your uncle. Surely not, I hope not. She paused and mused. I suppose we each find an exception in the one we love till we are married, suggested Caroline. I suppose so. And this exception we believe to be of sterling materials. We fancy it like ourselves. We imagine a sense of harmony. We think his voice gives the softest, truest promise of a heart that will never harden against us. We read in his eyes that faithful feeling affection. I don't think we should trust to what they call passion at all, Caroline. I believe it is a mere fire of dry sticks blazing up and vanishing. But we watch him and see him kind to animals, to little children, to poor people. He is kind to us likewise, good, considerate. He does not flatter women, but he is patient with them and he seems to be easy in their presence and to find their company genial. He likes them not only for vain and selfish reasons, but as we like him because we like him. Then we observe that he is just, that he always speaks the truth, that he is conscientious. We feel joy and peace when he comes into a room. We feel sadness and trouble when he leaves it. We know that this man has been a kind son, that he is a kind brother. Will anyone dare to tell me that he will not be a kind husband? My uncle would affirm it unhesitatingly. He will be sick of you in a month, he would say. Mrs. Pryor would seriously intimate the same. Miss York and Miss Mann would darkly suggest ditto. If they are true oracles, it is good never to fall in love. Very good if you can avoid it. I choose to doubt their truth. I am afraid that proves you are already caught. Not I, but if I were, do you know what soothsayers I would consult? Let me hear. Neither man nor woman, elderly nor young, the little Irish beggar that comes barefoot to my door, the mouse that steals out of the cranny in the wainscot, the bird that in frost and snow pecks at my window for a crumb, the dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee. Did you ever see anyone who was kind to such things? Did you ever see anyone whom such things seemed instinctively to follow, like, rely on? We have a black cat and an old dog at the rectory. I know somebody to whose knee that black cat loves to climb against whose shoulder and cheek it likes to purr. The old dog always comes out of his kennel and wags his tail and whines affectionately when somebody passes. And what does that somebody do? He quietly strokes the cat and lets her sit while he conveniently can, and when he must disturb her by rising, he puts her softly down and never flings her from him roughly. He always whistles to the dog and gives him a caress. Does he? It is not Robert. But it is Robert. Handsome fellow said surely with enthusiasm, her eyes sparkled. Is he not handsome? Has he not fine eyes and well-cut features and a clear princely forehead? He has all that, Caroline. Bless him, he is both graceful and good. I was sure you would see that he was when I first looked at your face. I knew you would. I was well inclined to him before I saw him. I liked him when I did see him. I admire him now. There is charm in beauty for itself, Caroline. When it is blend with goodness, there is a powerful charm. When mind is added, surely? Who can resist it? Remember my uncle, madame's prior York and man. Remember the croaking of the frogs of Egypt. He is a noble being. I tell you when they are good, they are lords of the creation. They are the sons of God, molded in their maker's image. The minutest spark of his spirit lifts them almost above mortality. Indisputably a great, good, handsome man is the first of created things. Above us? I would scorn to contend for empire with him. I would scorn it. Shall my left hand dispute for precedence with my right? Shall my heart quarrel with my pulse? Shall my veins be jealous of the blood which fills them? Men and women, husbands and wives, quarrel horribly, surely? Poor things, poor fallen degenerate things. God made them for another lot, for other feelings. But are we men's equals, or are we not? Nothing ever charms me more than when I meet my superior, one who makes me sincerely feel that he is my superior. Did you ever meet him? I should be glad to see him any day, the higher above me so much the better. It degrades to stoop. It is glorious to look up. What frets me is that when I try to esteem I am baffled, when religiously inclined there are but false gods to adore. I disdain to be a pagan. Miss Kildar, will you come in? We are here at the Rectory Gates. Not today, but tomorrow I shall fetch you to spend the evening with me. Caroline Hellstone, if you really are what at present to me you seem, you and I will suit. I have never in my whole life been able to talk to a young lady as I have talked to you this morning. Kiss me, and goodbye. End of chapter 12, part one.