McLean was greatly disappointed.  “Why send Tommy up at all if he is so backward?” he said.  “You are sure you have not exaggerated his deficiencies?”

“Well, not much at any rate.  But he baffles me; one day I think him a perfect numskull, and the next he makes such a show of the small drop of scholarship he has that I’m not sure but what he may be a genius.”

“That sounds better.  Does he study hard?”

“Study!  He is the most careless whelp that ever—­”

“But if I were to give him an inducement to study?”

“Such as?” asked Cathro, who could at times be as inquisitive as the doctor.

“We need not go into that.  But suppose it appealed to him?”

Cathro considered.  “To be candid,” he said, “I don’t think he could study, in the big meaning of the word.  I daresay I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that whatever knowledge that boy acquires he will dig out of himself.  There is something inside him, or so I think at times, that is his master, and rebels against book-learning.  No, I can’t tell what it is; when we know that we shall know the real Tommy.”

“And yet,” said McLean, curiously, “you advise his being allowed to compete for a bursary.  That, if you will excuse my saying so, sounds foolish to me.”

“It can’t seem so foolish to you,” replied Cathro, scratching his head, “as it seems to me six days in seven.”

“And you know that Aaron Latta has sworn to send him to the herding if he does not carry a bursary.  Surely the wisest course would be to apprentice him now to some trade—­”

“What trade would not be the worse of him?  He would cut off his fingers with a joiner’s saw, and smash them with a mason’s mell; put him in a brot behind a counter, and in some grand, magnanimous mood he would sell off his master’s things for nothing; make a clerk of him, and he would only ravel the figures; send him to the soldiering, and he would have a sudden impulse to fight on the wrong side.  No, no, Miss Ailie says he has a gift for the ministry, and we must cling to that.”

In thus sheltering himself behind Miss Ailie, where he had never skulked before, the dominie showed how weak he thought his position, and he added, with a brazen laugh, “Then if he does distinguish himself at the examinations I can take the credit for it, and if he comes back in disgrace I shall call you to witness that I only sent him to them at her instigation.”

“All which,” maintained McLean, as he put on his top-coat, “means that somehow, against your better judgment, you think he may distinguish himself after all.”

“You’ve found me out,” answered Cathro, half relieved, half sorry.  “I had no intention of telling you so much, but as you have found me out I’ll make a clean breast of it.  Unless something unexpected happens to the laddie—­unless he take to playing at scholarship as if it were a Jacobite rebellion, for instance—­he shouldna have the ghost of a chance of a bursary, and if he were any other boy as ill-prepared I should be ashamed to send him up, but he is Tommy Sandys, you see, and—­it is a terrible thing to say, but it’s Gospel truth, it’s Gospel truth—­I’m trusting to the possibility of his diddling the examiners!”