All night long Sylvia dreamed of burning volcanoes springing out of icy southern seas.  But, as in the specksioneer’s tale the flames were peopled with demons, there was no human interest for her in the wondrous scene in which she was no actor, only a spectator.  With daylight came wakening and little homely every-day wonders.  Did Kinraid mean that he was going away really and entirely, or did he not?  Was he Molly Corney’s sweetheart, or was he not?  When she had argued herself into certainty on one side, she suddenly wheeled about, and was just of the opposite opinion.  At length she settled that it could not be settled until she saw Molly again; so, by a strong gulping effort, she resolutely determined to think no more about him, only about the marvels he had told.  She might think a little about them when she sat at night, spinning in silence by the household fire, or when she went out in the gloaming to call the cattle home to be milked, and sauntered back behind the patient, slow-gaited creatures; and at times on future summer days, when, as in the past, she took her knitting out for the sake of the freshness of the faint sea-breeze, and dropping down from ledge to ledge of the rocks that faced the blue ocean, established herself in a perilous nook that had been her haunt ever since her parents had come to Haytersbank Farm.  From thence she had often seen the distant ships pass to and fro, with a certain sort of lazy pleasure in watching their swift tranquillity of motion, but no thought as to where they were bound to, or what strange places they would penetrate to before they turned again, homeward bound.

CHAPTER X

A REFRACTORY PUPIL

Sylvia was still full of the specksioneer and his stories, when Hepburn came up to give her the next lesson.  But the prospect of a little sensible commendation for writing a whole page full of flourishing ‘Abednegos,’ had lost all the slight charm it had ever possessed.  She was much more inclined to try and elicit some sympathy in her interest in the perils and adventures of the northern seas, than to bend and control her mind to the right formation of letters.  Unwisely enough, she endeavoured to repeat one of the narratives that she had heard from Kinraid; and when she found that Hepburn (if, indeed, he did not look upon the whole as a silly invention) considered it only as an interruption to the real business in hand, to which he would try to listen as patiently as he could, in the hope of Sylvia’s applying herself diligently to her copy-book when she had cleared her mind, she contracted her pretty lips, as if to check them from making any further appeals for sympathy, and set about her writing-lesson in a very rebellious frame of mind, only restrained by her mother’s presence from spoken mutiny.