ne denounced Moore as a Jacobin, ceased to see
him, would not even speak to him when they met. He intimated also to his
niece, very distinctly, that her communications with Hollow's Cottage
must for the present cease; she must give up taking French lessons. The
language, he observed, was a bad and frivolous one at the best, and most
of the works it boasted were bad and frivolous, highly injurious in
their tendency to weak female minds. He wondered (he remarked
parenthetically) what noodle first made it the fashion to teach women
French. Nothing was more improper for them. It was like feeding a
rickety child on chalk and water gruel. Caroline must give it up, and
give up her cousins too. They were dangerous people.

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