It would have been perhaps better for Flora if he had been a mere brute.

But he set about his sinister enterprise in a sentimental, cautious, almost paternal manner; and thought he would be safe with a pretty orphan.

The girl for all her experience was still too innocent, and indeed not yet sufficiently aware of herself as a woman, to mistrust these masked approaches.

She did not see them, in fact.

She thought him sympathetic--the first expressively sympathetic person she had ever met.