’In fact, said Miss Mohun, ’I have a suspicion that if a certificated schoolmaster could own any such thing, the pupil knew more than the teacher.  When your father comes home, I hope he will find some way of helping that lad.’

Gillian began to crimson, but bethought herself of the grandeur of its being found that she was the youth’s helper.  ’I am glad you have been lending him books,’ added Aunt Jane.

What business had she to know what had not been told her?  The sense of offence drove back any disposition to consult her.  Yet to teach Alexis was no slight task, for, though he had not gone far in Greek, his inquiries were searching, and explaining to him was a different thing from satisfying even Mr. Pollock.  Besides, Gillian had her own studies on hand.  The Cambridge examinations were beginning to assume larger proportions in the Rockquay mind, and ’the General Screw Company,’ as Mr. Grant observed, was prevailing.

Gillian’s knowledge was rather discursive, and the concentration required by an examination was hard work to her, and the time for it was shortened by the necessity of doing all Alexis’s Greek exercises and translations beforehand, and of being able to satisfy him why an error was not right, for, in all politeness, he always would know why it did not look right.  And there was Valetta, twisting and groaning.  The screw was on her form, who, unless especially exempted, were to compete for a prize for language examination.

Valetta had begun by despising Kitty Varley for being excepted by her mother’s desire and for not learning Latin; but now she envied any one who had not to work double tides at the book of Caesar that was to be taken up, and Vercingetorix and his Arverni got vituperated in a way that would have made the hair of her hero-worshipping mother fairly stand on end.

But then Lilias Mohun had studied him for love of himself, not for dread of failure.

Gillian had been displeased when Fergus deserted her for Aunt Jane as an assistant, but she would not have been sorry if Valetta had been off her hands, when she was interrupted in researches after an idiom in St. John’s Gospel by the sigh that this abominable dictionary had no verb oblo, or in the intricacies of a double equation by despair at this horrid Caesar always hiding away his nominatives out of spite.

Valetta, like the American child, evidently regarded the Great Julius in no other light than as writer of a book for beginners in Latin, and, moreover, a very unkind one; and she fully reciprocated the sentiment that it was no wonder that the Romans conquered the world, since they knew the Latin grammar by nature.

Nor was Gillian’s hasty and sometimes petulant assistance very satisfactory to the poor child, since it often involved hearing ’Wait a minute,’ and a very long one, ‘How can you be so stupid?’ ’I told you so long ago’; and sometimes consisted of a gabbling translation, with rapidly pointed finger, very hard to follow, and not quite so painstaking as when Alexis deferentially and politely pointed out the difficulties, with a strong sense of the favour that she was doing him.