“Meg!  Meg! ye do try my patience, lass, idlin’ awa’ yer time that get.  It’s an awfu’ wastery o’ time, what wi’ beuks, an’ what wi’ stravaguin’, an’ what wi’ naething ava.  Jist pit yer han’ to this kirn noo, like a gude bairn.”

Margaret would obey her mother instantly, but with a look of silent expostulation which her mother could not resist; sometimes, perhaps, if the words were sharper than usual, with symptoms of gathering tears; upon which Janet would say, with her honest smile of sweet relenting,

“Hootoots, bairn! never heed me.  My bark’s aye waur nor my bite; ye ken that.”

Then Margaret’s face would brighten at once, and she would work hard at whatever her mother set her to do, till it was finished; upon which her mother would be more glad than she, and in no haste to impose any further labour out of the usual routine.

In the course of reading Wordsworth, Margaret had frequent occasion to apply to Hugh for help.  These occasions, however, generally involved no more than small external difficulties, which prevented her from taking in the scope of a passage.  Hugh was always able to meet these, and Margaret supposed that the whole of the light which flashed upon her mind when they were removed, was poured upon the page by the wisdom of her tutor; never dreaming—­such was her humility with regard to herself, and her reverence towards him—­that it came from the depths of her own lucent nature, ready to perceive what the poet came prepared to show.  Now and then, it is true, she applied to him with difficulties in which he was incapable of aiding her; but she put down her failure in discovering the meaning, after all which it must be confessed he sometimes tried to say, to her own stupidity or peculiarity—­never to his incapacity.  She had been helped to so much by his superior acquirements, and his real gift for communicating what he thoroughly understood; he had been so entirely her guide to knowledge, that she would at once have felt self-condemned of impiety—­in the old meaning of the word—­if she had doubted for a moment his ability to understand or explain any difficulty which she could place clearly before him.

By-and-by he began to lend her harder, that is, more purely intellectual books.  He was himself preparing for the class of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics; and he chose for her some of the simpler of his books on these subjects—­of course all of the Scotch school—­beginning with Abercrombie’s Intellectual Powers.  She took this eagerly, and evidently read it with great attention.