“I never shall know anything unless you give me the book.”

“As saucy as ever.  You won’t dare, some day.”

Marjorie studied, Morris kept his eyes on a book that he did not read; neither spoke for fully three quarters of an hour.  Marjorie studied with no pretence:  Master McCosh had said that Miss West studied in fifteen minutes to more purpose than any other of her class did in an hour.  She did not study, she was absorbed; she had no existence excepting in the lesson; just now there had been no other world for her than the wondrous Milky Way.

“I shall have Miss West for a teacher,” he had told Miss Prudence.  Marjorie wondered if he ever would.  Mrs. Browning has told us: 

“Girls would fain know the end of everything.”

And Marjorie would fain have known the end of herself.  She would not be quite satisfied with Miss Prudence’s lovely life, even with this “compensation” of Prue; there was a perfection of symmetry in Miss Prudence’s character that she was aiming at, her character made her story, but what Marjorie would be satisfied to become she did not fully define even to Marjorie West.

“Now, I’m through,” she exclaimed, closing the book as an exclamation point; “but I won’t bother you with what I have learned.  Master McCosh knows the face of the sky as well as I know the alphabet.  You should have heard him and seen him one night, pointing here and there and everywhere:  That’s Orion, that’s Job’s coffin, that’s Cassiopeia!  As fast as he could speak.  That’s the Dipper, that’s the North Star!”

“I know them all,” said Morris.

“Why! when did you see them?”

“In my watches I’ve plenty of time to look at the stars!  I’ve plenty of time for thinking!”

“Have you seen an iceberg?”

“Yes, one floated down pretty near us going out—­the air was chillier and we found her glittering majesty was the cause of it.”

“Have you seen a whale?”

“I’ve seen black fish; they spout like whales.”

“And a nautilus.”

“Yes.”

“And Mother Carey’s chickens?”

“Yes.”

“Morris, I won’t tease you with nonsense!  What troubles you this morning?”

“My mother,” he said concisely.

“Is she ill?  Miss Prudence wrote to her last week”

“Does she ever reply?”

“I think so.  Miss Prudence has not shown me her letters.”

“Poor mother.  I suppose so.  I’m glad she writes at all.  You don’t know what it is to believe that God does not love you; to pray and have no answer; to be in despair.”

“Oh, dear, no,” exclaimed Marjorie, sympathetically.

“She is sure God has not forgiven her, she weeps and prays and takes no interest in anything.”

“I should not think she would.  I couldn’t.”