She dropped me one of her curtseys which were extraordinary taking.  “If you will be cross,” said she, “I must be making pretty manners at you, Davie.  I will be very obedient, as I should be when every stitch upon all there is of me belongs to you.  But you will not be very cross either, because now I have not anyone else.”

This struck me hard, and I made haste, in a kind of penitence, to blot out all the good effect of my last speech.  In this direction, progress was more easy, being down hill; she led me forward, smiling; at the sight of her, in the brightness of the fire and with her pretty becks and looks, my heart was altogether melted.  We made our meal with infinite mirth and tenderness; and the two seemed to be commingled into one, so that our very laughter sounded like a kindness.

In the midst of which I awoke to better recollections, made a lame word of excuse, and set myself boorishly to my studies.  It was a substantial, instructive book that I had bought, by the late Dr. Heineccius, in which I was to do a great deal of reading these next days, and often very glad that I had no one to question me of what I read.  Methought she bit her lip at me a little, and that cut me.  Indeed it left her wholly solitary, the more as she was very little of a reader, and had never a book.  But what was I to do?

So the rest of the evening flowed by almost without speech.

I could have beat myself.  I could not lie in my bed that night for rage and repentance, but walked to and fro on my bare feet till I was nearly perished, for the chimney was gone out and the frost keen.  The thought of her in the next room, the thought that she might even hear me as I walked, the remembrance of my churlishness and that I must continue to practise the same ungrateful course or be dishonoured, put me beside my reason.  I stood like a man between Scylla and Charybdis:  What must she think of me? was my one thought that softened me continually into weakness. What is to become of us? the other which steeled me again to resolution.  This was my first night of wakefulness and divided counsels, of which I was now to pass many, pacing like a madman, sometimes weeping like a childish boy, sometimes praying (I would fain hope) like a Christian.

But prayer is not very difficult, and the hitch comes in practice.  In her presence, and above all if I allowed any beginning of familiarity, I found I had very little command of what should follow.  But to sit all day in the same room with her, and feign to be engaged upon Heineccius, surpassed my strength.  So that I fell instead upon the expedient of absenting myself so much as I was able; taking out classes and sitting there regularly, often with small attention, the test of which I found the other day in a note-book of that period, where I had left off to follow an edifying lecture and actually scribbled in my book some very ill verses, though the Latinity