Things returned to their old way at Miss Tempest’s. Her friends never doubted she would now at last commit her plate to her banker’s strong room, but they found themselves mistaken: she was convinced that, with such servants and Abdiel, it was safe where it was. The leader of the gang, injured by Clare’s water-jug, was soon after captured, and the gang was broken up. Chapter LVII. ANN SHOTOVER. So void of self-assertion was Clare, so prompt at the call of whoever needed him, so quiet yet so quick, so silent in his sympathetic ministrations, so studious and so capable, that, after two years, Miss Tempest began to feel she ought to do what she could to “advance his prospects,” even at the loss to herself of his services. He never came to regard Miss Tempest as he did the other women who had saved him: he never thought of her as his fourth mother. Truly good and kind she was, but she had a certain manner which prevented him from feeling entirely comfortable with her. It did not escape him, however, that Abdiel was thoroughly at his ease in her company; and he believed therefore that the dog knew her better, or at least was more just to her, than he. The fact was Miss Tempest kept down all her feelings, with a vague sense that to show them would be to waste her substance: it was the one shape that the yet lingering selfishness of a very unselfish person took. Thus she kept him at a distance, and he stayed at a distance, she on her part wondering that he did not open out to her more, but neither doubting that all was right between them. Nothing, indeed, was wrong--only they might have come a little nearer. Perhaps, also, Miss Tempest was a little too conscious of being his patroness, his earthly saviour. It was natural that, after the defeated robbery, Clare should become a little known to the friends of the mistress he had so well served; when, therefore, Miss Tempest spoke to her banker concerning the ability of her page, mentioning that, in his spare time, he had been reading hard, as well as attending an evening-school for mathematics, where he gained much approbation from his master, she spoke of one already known by him to one accustomed to regard character. The banker listened with a solemn listening from which she could not tell what he was thinking. No one ever could tell what Mr. Shotover was thinking: his face was not half a face; it was more a mask than a face. High in the world’s regard, rich, and of unquestioned integrity, he was believed to have gathered a large fortune; but he kept his affairs to himself. That he liked his own way so much as never to yield it, I give up to the admiration of such as himself: often kind--when the required mode of the kindness pleased him, a constant church-goer and giver of money, always saying less the more he made up his mind, he had generally no trouble in getting it.