The blue and white note-book was lying on the floor where Miss Ailie had dropped it.  Often in Tommy’s presence she had consulted this work, and certainly its effect on her was the reverse of laughter; but once he had seen Dr. McQueen pick it up and roar over every page.  With an inspiration Tommy handed the book to Mr. McLean.  “It made the doctor laugh,” he said persuasively.

“Go away,” said Ivie, impatiently; “I am in no mood for laughing.”

“I tell you what,” answered Tommy, “I’ll go, if you promise to look at it,” and to be rid of him the man agreed.  For the next quarter of an hour Tommy and Gavinia were very near the door of the blue-and-white room, Tommy whispering dejectedly, “I hear no laughing,” and Gavinia replying, “But he has quieted down.”

Mr. McLean had a right to be very angry, but God only can say whether he had a right to be as angry as he was.  The book had been handed to him open, and he was laying it down unread when a word underlined caught his eye.  It was his own name.  Nothing in all literature arrests our attention quite so much as that.  He sat down to the book.  It was just about this time that Miss Ailie went on her knees to pray.

It was only a penny pass-book.  On its blue cover had been pasted a slip of white paper, and on the paper was written, in blue ink, “Alison Cray,” with a date nearly nine years old.  The contents were in Miss Ailie’s prim handwriting; jottings for her own use begun about the time when the sisters, trembling at their audacity, had opened school, and consulted and added to fitfully ever since.  Hours must have been spent in erasing the blots and other blemishes so carefully.  The tiny volume was not yet full, and between its two last written pages lay a piece of blue blotting-paper neatly cut to the size of the leaf.

Some of these notes were transcripts from books, some contained the advice of friends, others were doubtless the result of talks with Miss Kitty (from whom there were signs that the work had been kept a secret), many were Miss Ailie’s own.  An entry of this kind was frequent:  “If you are uncertain of the answer to a question in arithmetic, it is advisable to leave the room on some pretext and work out the sum swiftly in the passage.”  Various pretexts were suggested, and this one (which had an insufficient line through it) had been inserted by Dr. McQueen on that day when Tommy saw him chuckling, “You pretend that your nose is bleeding and putting your handkerchief to it, retire hastily, the supposition being that you have gone to put the key of the blue-and-white room down your back.”  Evidently these small deceptions troubled Miss Ailie, for she had written, “Such subterfuge is, I hope, pardonable, the object being the maintenance of scholastic discipline.”  On another page, where the arithmetic was again troubling her, this appeared:  “If Kitty were aware that the squealing of the slate-pencils gave me such headaches, she would insist on again taking the arithmetic class, though it always makes her ill.  Surely, then, I am justified in saying that the sound does not distress me.”  To this the doctor had added, “You are a brick.”