"Lady Louisa may be anything she likes," said he, "but it is impossible she can match this peasant-girl without a single grace of dress or culture. I never saw anything like her--never." "I have heard of gentlemen picking up pretty girls and sending them to be educated with a view of marrying them," said Miss Robertson. "I've heard of that too," said the doctor. "Well, beauty is a wonderful gift; that is, the transcendent beauty that every one acknowledges." "And very rare," said Mary. "I should like to see the beauty every one would acknowledge. If this girl seemed as beautiful to every one as she does to you, I think she would have been advanced to a tobacconist's shop at least by this time." "Don't speak of it!" said her brother. V. On the following day about the same hour Dr. Brunton approached the lodge where he had come so often full of pity, and had submitted to be bored with a good grace. But instead of dragging himself up to make this visit as a tiresome duty, which he had sometimes felt it to be, it had floated before his mind all day, and he went through the gate with the most vivid and even tremulous expectation and interest. But the celestial beauty in the amber beads was not there. He sat and listened patiently to the old woman's story, and various times tried to draw her out about her visitor of yesterday; but she was so occupied with herself that she could speak of nothing else, and he left with a stinging, empty sense of disappointment, as he did on the next day, and the next; but on the fourth the rustic beauty reappeared, as innocently simple and slightly sheepish in manner as before. "You have not been here for some days?" the doctor said to her. "Na, I couldna coom." "Why not?" "My faither said I was to bide in the house and mind my wark." "What do you do? Can you read well?" "Oh, ay, I can read no that ill: I whiles take a lesson on the newspapers." "Can you write?" "Weel, I canna say muckle for my writing, but the likes o' us hae nae time to put off writing;" and she sent her eyes right into the eyes of the doctor, as they stood beside Bell's little window--innocently, simply, appealingly, the doctor felt--and from that moment he was a lost man: his prudence went down like straws before the wind. "You are far too beautiful," he said with deep earnestness, "to go to service: would you not like to be educated and be a lady?" "Oh, I wad like it weel aneuch, I daur say, but I'll just hae to be content wi' the place I'm in: I've a heap to be thankfu' for, and I maun bide wi' my faither." "But you'll not be with him if you are at service?" "No, but I can help him with the siller I mak." The doctor was silent. This girl was good, then, as well as beautiful. "Are you his only child?" he asked: "have you no brothers or sisters?" "I've nae brothers, but I've twa sisters." "And what do they do?" "The ane's married, and, the ither bides at name like me, except when she's awa'."