"Yes, of course; I knew it well."
"How chanced it that you never mentioned it to me?" asked Caroline. "You knew Mrs. Pryor was my mother, and were silent, and now here again is another secret."
"I never made it a secret; you never asked me who Henry's tutor was, or I would have told you."
"I am puzzled about more things than one in this matter. You don't like poor Louis--why? Do you wish that Robert's brother were more highly placed?"
"Robert's brother, indeed!" was the exclamation in a tone of scorn, and, with a movement of proud impatience, Shirley snatched a rose from a branch peeping through the open lattice. "Robert's brother! Robert's brother is a topic on which you and I shall quarrel if we discuss it often; so drop it henceforth and for ever."
She would have understood the meaning of that outburst better if she had heard a conversation in the schoolroom a few days later between Louis Moore and Shirley.
"For two years," he was saying, "I had once a pupil who grew very dear to me. Henry is dear, but she was dearer. Henry never gives me trouble; she--well--she did. She spilled the draught from my cup; and having taken from me my peace of mind and ease of life, she took from me herself, quite coolly--just as if, when she was gone, the world would be all the same to me. At the end of two years it fell out that we encountered again. She received me haughtily; but then she was inconsistent: she tantalised as before. When I thought of her only as a lofty stranger, she would suddenly show me a glimpse of loving simplicity, warm me with such a beam of reviving sympathy that I could no more shut my heart to her image than I could close that door against her presence. Explain why she distressed me so."
"She could not bear to be quite outcast," was the docile reply.
Caroline would have understood still more could she have read what Louis Moore wrote in his diary that night: "What a child she is sometimes! What an unsophisticated, untaught thing! I worship her perfections; but it is her faults, or at least her foibles, that bring her near to me. If I were a king and she were a housemaid, my eye would recognise her qualities."
Robert Moore had long been absent from Briarfield, and no one knew why he stayed away. It could not be that he was afraid, for he had shown the utmost fearlessness in bringing to justice and transportation the four ringleaders in the attack on the mill. He had now returned, and one day as he rode over Rushedge Moore from Stilbro' market with a bluff neighbour, he unbosomed himself of the reason why he had remained thus long from home.