d capricious--sometimes venting
itself in expressions of a passionate fondness, which had a savor of
protecting generosity in them, and then receding to the icy pole of
surly petulance. For all that, there was no resisting the magnetic
attraction with which in his amiable moods he drew those whom he liked
to himself.

Such people are not very wholesome companions for those who are
sensitively organized and predisposed to self-sacrificing love. They
keep the heart in a perpetual freeze and thaw, which, like the American
northern climate, is so particularly fatal to plants of a delicate
habit. They could live through the hot summer and the cold winter, but
they cannot endure the three or four months when it freezes one day and
melts the next,--when all the buds are started out by a week of genial
sunshine, and then frozen for a fortnight. These fitful persons are of
all others most engrossing, because you are always sure in their good
moods that they are just going to be angels,--an expectation which no
number of disappointments seems finally to do away. Mara believed in
Moses's future as she did in her own existence. He was going to do
something great and good,--that she was certain of. He would be a
splendid man! Nobody, she thought, knew him as she did; nobody could
know how good and generous he was _sometimes_, and how frankly he would
confess his faults, and what noble aspirations he had!

But there was no concealing from her watchful sense that Moses was
beginning to have secrets from her. He was cloudy and murky; and at some
of the most harmless inquiries in the world, would flash out with a
sudden temper, as if she had touched some sore spot. Her bedroom was
opposite to his; and she became quite sure that night after night, while
she lay thinking of him, she heard him steal down out of the house
between two and three o'clock, and not return till a little before
day-dawn. Where he went, and with whom, and what he was doing, was to
her an awful mystery,--and it was one she dared not share with a human
being. If she told her kind old grandfather, she feared that any
inquiry from him would only light as a spark on that inflammable spirit
of pride and insubordination that was rising within him, and bring on an
instantaneous explosion. Mr. Sewell's influence she could hope little
more from; and as to poor Mrs. Pennel, such communications would only
weary and distress her, without doing any manner of good. There was,
t