feel.«
    »Come this minute: my mother has coughed, got up, set her feet on the floor.
Let her only catch you on the stairs, Miss Caroline: you're not to bid him
good-bye« (stepping between her and Moore), - »you are to march.«
    »My shawl, Martin.«
    »I have it. I'll put it on for you when you are in the hall.«
    He made them part: he would suffer no farewell but what could be expressed
in looks: he half carried Caroline down the stairs. In the hall he wrapped her
shawl round her, and - but that his mother's tread then creaked in the gallery,
and but that a sentiment of diffidence - the proper, natural, therefore the
noble impulse of his boy's heart, held him back, he would have claimed his
reward - he would have said, »Now, Miss Caroline, for all this give me one
kiss.« But ere the words had passed his lips, she was across the snowy road,
rather skimming than wading the drifts.
    »She is my debtor, and I will be paid.«
    He flattered himself that it was opportunity, not audacity, which had failed
him: he misjudged the quality of his own nature, and held it for something lower
than it was.
 

                                 Chapter XXXIV

Case of Domestic Persecution. - Remarkable Instance of Pious Perseverance in the
                         Discharge of Religious Duties

Martin, having known the taste of excitement, wanted a second draught; having
felt the dignity of power, he loathed to relinquish it. Miss Helstone - that
girl he had always called ugly, and whose face was now perpetually before his
eyes, by day and by night, in dark and in sunshine - had once come within his
sphere: it fretted him to think the visit might never be repeated.
    Though a schoolboy, he was no ordinary schoolboy: he was destined to grow up
an original. At a few years later date, he took great pains to pare and polish
himself down to the pattern of the rest of the world, but he never succeeded: an
unique stamp marked him always. He now sat idle at his desk in the
grammar-school, casting about in his mind for the means of adding another
chapter to his commenced romance: he did not yet know how many commenced
life-romances are doomed never to get beyond the first - or, at most, the second
chapter. His Saturday half-holiday he spent in the wood with his book of fairy
legends, and