always in turmoil, get quite
belligerent. Really, there's an ardour excited by the thoughts of danger
that makes my heart pant. When Mrs. Sykes is afraid of the house being
attacked and broke open--as she is every night--I get quite excited. I
couldn't describe to you, sir, my feelings. Really, if anybody was to
come--thieves or anything--I believe I should enjoy it, such is my
spirit."

The hardest of laughs, though brief and low, and by no means insulting,
was the response of the rector. Moore would have pressed upon the heroic
mill-owner a third tumbler, but the clergyman, who never transgressed,
nor would suffer others in his presence to transgress, the bounds of
decorum, checked him.

"Enough is as good as a feast, is it not, Mr. Sykes?" he said; and Mr.
Sykes assented, and then sat and watched Joe Scott remove the bottle at
a sign from Helstone, with a self-satisfied simper on his lips and a
regretful glisten in his eye. Moore looked as if he should have liked to
fool him to the top of his bent. What would a certain young kinswoman of
his have said could she have seen her dear, good, great Robert--her
Coriolanus--just now? Would she have acknowledged in that mischievous,
sardonic visage the same face to which she had looked up with such love,
which had bent over her with such gentleness last night? Was that the
man who had spent so quiet an evening with his sister and his cousin--so
suave to one, so tender to the other--reading Shakespeare and listening
to Chenier?

Yes, it was the same man, only seen on a different side--a side Caroline
had not yet fairly beheld, though perhaps she had enough sagacity
faintly to suspect its existence. Well, Caroline had, doubtless, her
defective side too. She was human. She must, then, have been very
imperfect; and had she seen Moore on his very worst side, she would
probably have said this to herself and excused him. Love can excuse
anything except meanness; but meanness kills love, cripples even natural
affection; without esteem true love cannot exist. Moore, with all his
faults, might be esteemed; for he had no moral scrofula in his mind, no
hopeless polluting taint--such, for instance, as that of falsehood;
neither was he the slave of his appetites. The active life to which he
had been born and bred had given him something else to do than to join
the futile chase of the pleasure-hunter. He was a man undegraded, the
disciple of reason, _not_ the votary of sense. The same m