“Yes, sir.”

He extended a plump, white hand and, not at all shyly, Marjorie laid her hand in it.

“Isn’t it late to come from school?  Did you play on the way home?”

“No sir; I’m too big for that”

“Doesn’t school dismiss earlier?”

“Yes, sir,” flushing and dropping her eyes, “but I was kept in.”

“Kept in,” he repeated, smoothing the little hand.  “I’m sure it was not for bad behavior and you look bright enough to learn your lessons.”

“I didn’t know my lessons,” she faltered.

“Then you should have done as Stephen Grellet did,” he returned, releasing her hand.

“How did he do?” she asked.

Nobody loved stories better than Marjorie.

Pushing her mother’s spring rocker nearer the fire, she sat down, arranged the skirt of her dress, and, prepared herself, not to “entertain” him, but to listen.

“Did you never read about him?”

“I never even heard of him.”

“Then I’ll tell you something about him.  His father was an intimate friend and counsellor of Louis XVI.  Stephen was a French boy.  Do you know who Louis XVI was?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know the French for Stephen?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you don’t study French.  I’d study everything if I were you.  My wife has read the Hebrew Bible through.  She is a scholar as well as a good housewife.  It needn’t hinder, you see.”

“No, sir,” repeated Marjorie.

“When little Etienne—­that’s French for Stephen—­was five or six years old he had a long Latin exercise to learn, and he was quite disheartened.”

Marjorie’s eyes opened wide in wonder.  Six years old and a long Latin exercise.  Even Hollis had not studied Latin.

“Sitting alone, all by himself, to study, he looked out of the window abroad upon nature in all her glorious beauty, and remembered that God made the gardens, the fields and the sky, and the thought came to him:  ‘Cannot the same God give me memory, also?’ Then he knelt at the foot of his bed and poured out his soul in prayer.  The prayer was wonderfully answered; on beginning to study again, he found himself master of his hard lesson, and, after that, he acquired learning with great readiness.”

It was wonderful, Marjorie thought, and beautiful, but she could not say that; she asked instead:  “Did he write about it himself?”

“Yes, he has written all about himself.”

“When I was six I didn’t know my small letters.  Was he so bright because he was French?”

The gentleman laughed and remarked that the French were a pretty bright nation.

“Is that all you know about him?”

“Oh, no, indeed; there’s a large book of his memoirs in my library.  He visited many of the crowned heads of Europe.”

There was another question forming on Marjorie’s lips, but at that instant her mother opened the door.  Now she would hear no more about Stephen Grellet and she could not ask about the Wicket Gate or Mercy or the children.