could not understand what anybody could want with more learning who was, able to earn money.  So Geordie had one day lingered behind the other scholars to tell Grace that the idea of going to school even during the winter quarter must be given up.  There was always a manly reticence about the boy which made one feel that words of sympathy would be patronising; but Grace could see what a bitter disappointment it was, though he appeared quite unalterable in his decision that he “belonged to Gowrie,” when Grace tried to arrange the matter by an interview with the farmer.  He could only claim the boy week by week, and the young teacher did not see the necessity for such self-denial on Geordie’s part.

Then Grace’s store of pocket-money had been devoted to sending little Jean to school.  This arrangement had been a source of great delight to Geordie—­much more of an event to him, indeed, than to the phlegmatic little Jean, to whom the primer did not contain such precious possibilities as it did to her brother’s eyes.  Grace had arranged that she should go to a girls’ school lately opened in the parish.  It was the one to which Elsie Gray, the forester’s daughter, went.  On her way to school she had to pass Granny Baxter’s cottage, and after Jean was installed as her fellow-scholar, Elsie used generally to call and see if the little girl was ready to start, so that they might walk along the road together.

Elsie was a pale, fragile-looking girl, who looked as if she had grown among crowded streets, rather than blossomed in the open valley, with its flowing river and breezy hillsides.  She was a very silent child, too, with a meek grace about all her movements; her large grey eyes shone out of her face with a luminous, dreamy light in them, which distressed her practical, rosy-faced mother, who used to say that she did not know where Elsie had come by “those ghaist-like eyes o’ hers,” and as for those washed-out cheeks, “there was no accountin’ for them neither;” and the worthy matron would go on to narrate with what abundance and amplitude Elsie had been ministered to all her life; and yet Elsie glided about still and pale, with her large eyes shining like precious stones, generally hungrily possessed by some book which she held in her hand.  She had an insatiable appetite for reading, and had long ago exhausted the juvenile library attached to the church, while the few books which comprised the forester’s collection had been read and re-read by her many times.  The farmer librarian, who remained half an hour after the congregation was dismissed on Sundays to dispense books for any that might wish them, in the room behind the church, had been obliged to give Elsie entrance to the shelves reserved for older people, after she had exhausted the youthful library.  It is not to be supposed, however, that by this admission Elsie was allowed to plunge chartless into light literature.  The shelves contained only books of the most sober kind, the lightest admixture being narratives of the