oore was, if not lively
himself, a willing spectator of the liveliness of Caroline Helstone, his
cousin, a complacent listener to her talk, a ready respondent to her
questions. Sometimes he was better than this--almost animated, quite
gentle and friendly. The drawback was that by the next morning he was
frozen up again.

To-night he stood on the kitchen hearth of Hollow's cottage, after his
return from Whinbury cloth-market, and Caroline, who had come over to
the cottage from the vicarage, stood beside him. Looking down, his
glance rested on an uplifted face, flushed, smiling, happy, shaded with
silky curls, lit with fine eyes. Moore placed his hand a moment on his
young cousin's shoulder, stooped, and left a kiss on her forehead.

"Are you certain, Robert, you are not fretting about your frames and
your business, and the war?" she asked.

"Not just now."

"Are you positive you don't feel Hollow's cottage too small for you, and
narrow, and dismal?"

"At this moment, no."

"Can you affirm that you are not bitter at heart because rich and great
people forget you?"

"No more questions. I am not anxious to curry favour with rich and great
people. I only want means--a position--a career."

"Which your own talent and goodness shall win for you. You were made to
be great; you shall be great."

"Ah! You judge me with your heart; you should judge me with your head."

It was the dark days of the Napoleonic wars, when the cloth of the West
Riding was shut out from the markets of the world, and ruin threatened
the manufacturers, while the introduction of machinery so reduced the
numbers of the factory hands that desperation was born of misery and
famine.

Robert Moore, of Hollow's Mill, was one of the most unpopular of the
mill-owners, partly because he haughtily declined to conciliate the
working class, and partly because of his foreign demeanour, for he was
the son of a Flemish mother, had been educated abroad, and had only come
home recently to attempt to retrieve, by modern trading methods, the
fallen fortune of the ancient firm of his Yorkshire forefathers.

The last trade outrage of the district had been the destruction on
Stilbro' Moor of the new machines that were being brought by night to
his mill.

Caroline Helstone was eighteen years old, drawing near the confines of
illusive dreams. Elf-land behind her, the shores of Reality in front. To
herself she said that night, after Robert had walked home with her