edate charm, suggestive, whether truly or delusively, of a
considerate, perhaps a kind nature, of feelings that may wear well at
home--patient, forbearing, possibly faithful feelings. He is still
young--not more than thirty; his stature is tall, his figure slender.
His manner of speaking displeases. He has an outlandish accent, which,
notwithstanding a studied carelessness of pronunciation and diction,
grates on a British, and especially on a Yorkshire, ear.

Mr. Moore, indeed, was but half a Briton, and scarcely that. He came of
a foreign ancestry by the mother's side, and was himself born and partly
reared on a foreign soil. A hybrid in nature, it is probable he had a
hybrid's feeling on many points--patriotism for one; it is likely that
he was unapt to attach himself to parties, to sects, even to climes and
customs; it is not impossible that he had a tendency to isolate his
individual person from any community amidst which his lot might
temporarily happen to be thrown, and that he felt it to be his best
wisdom to push the interests of Robert Gerard Moore, to the exclusion of
philanthropic consideration for general interests, with which he
regarded the said Gerard Moore as in a great measure disconnected. Trade
was Mr. Moore's hereditary calling: the Gerards of Antwerp had been
merchants for two centuries back. Once they had been wealthy merchants;
but the uncertainties, the involvements, of business had come upon them;
disastrous speculations had loosened by degrees the foundations of their
credit. The house had stood on a tottering base for a dozen years; and
at last, in the shock of the French Revolution, it had rushed down a
total ruin. In its fall was involved the English and Yorkshire firm of
Moore, closely connected with the Antwerp house, and of which one of the
partners, resident in Antwerp, Robert Moore, had married Hortense
Gerard, with the prospect of his bride inheriting her father Constantine
Gerard's share in the business. She inherited, as we have seen, but his
share in the liabilities of the firm; and these liabilities, though duly
set aside by a composition with creditors, some said her son Robert
accepted, in his turn, as a legacy, and that he aspired one day to
discharge them, and to rebuild the fallen house of Gerard and Moore on a
scale at least equal to its former greatness. It was even supposed that
he took by-past circumstances much to heart; and if a childhood passed
at the side of a saturnine