‘Then you must have more of her company. I must talk to papa about it.’ ‘Oh, pray do not trouble my father,’ exclaimed Beatrix, anxiously. ‘But he must be troubled. You must have youthful society. I know that Miss Scales is all kindness, and her conversation most improving.’ Miss Scales acknowledged the compliment with a stiffish bow. ‘But you must have a young companion with whom you can unbend, and talk a little nonsense now and then, not about the Greeks and Romans, you know, but about your new frocks and your beaux.’ Miss Scales looked an image of disgust. ‘For my own part I believe if Beatrix would employ her mind there would be none of this repining,’ she remarked severely. ‘Low spirits with young people generally mean idleness.’ ‘My dear Miss Scales, I have not been repining,’ remonstrated Beatrix, wounded by this accusation. ‘I don’t want any one to be troubled about me. I only wish to be let alone.’ She turned from them both with a proud movement of head and throat, and went on looking out of the window; but her fixed gaze saw very little of the gray landscape under the gray sky, the dark shoulder of the moor, tinged with a gleam of livid winter light upon its western edge. Mr. Namby looked at her curiously as she stood there with averted face, palpably, by her very attitude, refusing all sympathy or solicitude from him or her governess. He was not a profound psychologist. He had, indeed, given his attention too completely to the management of other people’s bodies to have had much leisure for the study of the mind, but he felt instinctively that here was a case of supreme misery--a proud young soul at war with life--a girl, capable of all girlhood’s warmest affections, confined to the dry-as-dust companionship of a human machine for grinding grammar and geography, histories and ologies. A reasonable amount of this grinding would have been good for Beatrix, no doubt, thought the village surgeon, who was no enemy to education; but there must be something brighter than these things in the life of a girl, or she will languish like a woodland bird newly caged. Mr. Namby went down stairs, and asked to see Mr. Harefield--an awful thing to him always, but duty compelled him to beard the lion in his den. He was shown into the library where Christian Harefield sat among his books, as usual, brown leather-bound folios and quartos piled upon the floor on each side of his chair, more books on his desk, and a general appearance of profound study. What he read, or to what end he read, no one had ever discovered. He filled commonplace books with extracts, copied in a neat fine hand, almost as close as print, and he wrote a good deal of original matter. But he had never given a line to the world, not so much as a paragraph in _Notes and Queries_; nor had he ever confided the nature of his studies to friend or acquaintance. He lived among his books, and in his books, and for the last ten years he had cared for no life outside them.