Thus Killigrew—­to Ishmael, who was growing vaguely aware of a difference from his fellows that he could not remedy, the argument would have had no force.  Killigrew was neither of those St. Rennyites who despised girls, nor of those who held the cult of the doctor’s daughter, that dizzy exemplar of fashion, nor of those others—­a small band these latter, made up of the best boys in the school, little and big—­who admired and liked Hilaria as a “good sort.”  Killigrew was determined to be different, and so, like Burns, “battered” himself into love.  If Ishmael had been disposed to feel a tender sentiment for her himself, he could not have cherished it with any comfort, being already cast by Killigrew for the confidant of passion.  Thus it came about that, though in after years those stolen meetings between Hilaria and a ring of boys would flash into his memory as being romance in essence, at the time they held no more thrill for him than might be imparted by some new novel—­contraband in the perpetual war against grown-ups—­that she would bring to read aloud to them in some hollow of the moor.  Always it was from the angle of the third person—­that most comfortable of view-points—­that he saw her.  Only later by the light that lingered round her ways did he know how she had stood for beauty.

Now, as he watched her sway and dip before him, it only struck him that she differed from the little misses on her either hand, but quite how, except that he would have said she was jollier, more like a boy, he couldn’t have told.  That indeed, translated from boy-like into unmaidenly, was the town’s chief complaint against her, or primarily against her father.  Mr. Eliot’s position was not an easy one, and he did nothing to make it easier.  For he was half French, his mother having been brought over as a little girl at the time of the Terror.  There were people still alive in the ’fifties and ’sixties who remembered the Napoleonic wars and the shadow cast by that giant figure upon the world; indeed, so slowly did thought move down in the far West that it might almost have been said that St. Renny was just beginning to realise the wars, and rather resented the fact that English and French had since fought side by side in the Crimea.  Also the vagaries of Napoleon III. kept England in a perpetual state of distrust, in spite of the championship of Lord Palmerston, then in his second Ministry.  Mothers still frighted their babes with the name of Boney, and the French were still the hereditary enemies of all good Cornishmen, so many of whom had gone to man the fleet that won at Trafalgar.  The obscure feeling of distrust that always stirs in the lower classes of remote districts at anything alien did not, of course, extend to the educated people, but Mr. Eliot, being poor and very eccentric, refused such championship from his equals as might have been his.