She smiled up in his face with just a hint of a little coquette that died in her twenty years before. She said “Good-night,” and then she was gone. Mr. Spencer’s footsteps sounded more slowly on the flagstone as he resumed his accustomed evening walk, in which for once his mind was not on London town, and old friends there, but upon the odd thing that while this old maid had smiled upon him, there was a tear very plain upon her cheek. CHAPTER IX--ACADEMIA In the fulness of time, Gilian attained to the highest class in old Brooks’ school, pushed up thereto by no honest application of his own, but by the luck that attends on such as have God’s gift to begin with. And now that he was among the children of the town he found them lovable, but yet no more lovable than the children of the glen. The magic he had fancied theirs as he surveyed them from a distance, the fascination they had before, even when they had mocked with cries of “Crotal-coat, Crotal-coat,” did not very bravely stand a close trial. He was not dismayed at this; he did as we must all be doing through life and changed one illusion for another. It is a wonderful rich world for dreams, and he had a different one every day, as he sat in the peaty odour of instruction. Old Brooks would perch high on his three-legged stool conning over some exercise while his scholars in their rows behind the knife-hewn inky desks hummed like bees upon their tasks. The hornbooks of the little ones at the bottom of the room would sometimes fall from their hands in the languor of that stagnant atmosphere, but the boys of the upper forms were ever awake for mischief. To the teaching of the Dominie they would come with pockets full of playthings, sometimes animals from the woods and fields about the town--frogs, moles, hedgehogs, or fledgeling birds. Brooks rarely suspected the presence of these distractions in his sacred grove, for he was dull of vision and preferred to see his scholars about him in a vague mist rather than wear in their presence the great horn spectacles that were privy to his room in Crombie’s Land. The town’s clock staring frankly in at the school windows conveyed to him no knowledge of the passing enemy, and, as his watch had been for a generation but a bulge upon his vest, he must wait till the hour struck ere he knew it was meridian and time to cross the playground and into Kate Bell’s for his glass of waters. “Silence till I return!” he would say, whipping on his better coat and making for the door that had no sooner shut on him than tumult reigned.