"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 to the rectory gate: "I love Robert, and I feel sure that he loves me. I have thought so many a time before; to-day I felt it."