"I love him," said Montagu, "but we don’t see him very often now. Robina’s taken the huff at him—he told me so. It’s a pity isn’t it?" "The less Robina sees of Sandie, the more likely is she to attend to her duties," Miss Esperance remarked austerely. Then suddenly, her whole face beaming, she added softly, as though to herself, "The lassie’s full young for that sort of thing yet awhile." If Robina had escaped lightly when Edmund was lost, Nemesis was by no means leaden-footed as regarded her latest escapade. She very nearly lost her situation, and only by the combined and reiterated entreaties of herself and her mother was Miss Esperance prevailed upon to give the girl another trial. Therefore did Robina, with the unreason of her sex, lay the whole blame upon Sandie; and considered that he, and he alone, was responsible for the mistrustful attitude of the authorities with regard to her. She declined to speak to him or even to look at him for a whole fortnight. Morning and evening she passed him by, till at last he threatened that if she remained so obdurate he would forsake the church of his fathers and become a Piskey. Then, and only then, did Robina relent. "I couldna hae that on my conscience," she reflected. But all the same, although she condescended to speak to Sandie "whiles," he found that he had to do most of his wooing all over again; and Robina would smile to herself from time to time as she reflected that "it’s an ill wind blows nobody good." Robina was one of those who believed that what a man wants he will ask for over and over again; and that the harder a thing is to obtain the more it is valued. So she was very niggardly in the matter of her favours to Sandie, and her work prospered in consequence. *CHAPTER VI* *THE AWAKENING OF MR. WYCHERLY* Ay; you would gaze on a wind-shaken tree By the hour, nor count time lost. PARACELSUS. Montagu’s education was taken in hand at once, and a very curious course of instruction it proved to be. Mr. Wycherly taught him to read, and to read Latin at the same time that he learned to read English. He also, which Montagu very much preferred, told him endless stories, historical and mythological, and in illustration thereof gave him for himself his own two precious oblong folios of Flaxman’s "Compositions," on the very first birthday the little boy spent with Miss Esperance. These books were for Montagu the only nursery picture books he knew, and Ulysses and Hector were as real and familiar to him as "Jack the Giant Killer" or "Bluebeard" to the ordinary child. He treasured them and treated them always with the greatest care and tenderness. They were the one possession he declined to share with Edmund, who was careless, and tore things, to whom wide margins and spacious pages made no appeal. He pored over the pictures for hours at a time, arriving at a very clear conception of the beauty of pure line.