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 fowlingpiece, 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 up-stairs, 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
