"I wanted to learn how before I showed you," she said. "I am never going to show them to any one but you and mother and father." "But you must go somewhere to study," cried Sandy. "It's a great artist you'll be some day." She shook her head. "It's not for me, Sandy. I'll always be like a little beggar girl that peeps through the fence into a beautiful garden. I know all the wonderful things are there, but I'll never get to them." "But ye will," cried Sandy, hot with sympathy. "I'll be making money some day, and I'll send ye to the finest master in the country; and you will be getting well and strong, and we'll go--" Mr. Meech, shuffling up the walk toward them, interrupted. "Studying for the examination, eh? That's right, my boy. The judge tells me that you have a good chance to win the scholarship." "Did he, now?" said Sandy, with shameless pleasure; "and you, Mr. Meech, do ye think the same?" "I certainly do," said Mr. Meech. "Anybody that can accomplish the work you do at home, and hold your record at the academy, stands an excellent chance." Sandy thought so, too, but he tried to be modest. "If it'll be in me, it will come out," he said with suppressed triumph as he swung his books across his shoulder and started home. Martha's eyes followed him wistfully, and she hoped for a backward look before he turned in at the door. But he was absorbed in sailing a broomstick across Aunt Melvy's pathway, causing her to drop her basket and start after him in hot pursuit. That evening the judge glanced across the table with great satisfaction at Sandy, who was apparently buried in his Vergil. The boy, after all, was a student; he was justifying the money and time that had been spent upon him; he was proving a credit to his benefactor's judgment and to his knowledge of human nature. "Would ye mind telling me a word that rhymes with lance?" broke in Sandy after an hour of absorbed concentration. "Pants," suggested the judge. But he woke up in the night to wonder again what part of Vergil Sandy had been studying. "How about the scholarship?" he asked the next day of Mr. Moseley, the principal of the academy. Mr. Moseley pursed his lips and considered the matter ponderously. He regarded it as ill befitting an instructor of youth to dispose of any subject in words of less than three syllables. "Your protégé, Judge Hollis, is an ambiguous proposition. He possesses invention and originality, but he is sadly lacking in sustained concentration." "But if he studies," persisted the judge, "you think he may win it?" Mr. Moseley wrinkled his brows and looked as if he were solving a problem in Euclid. "Probably," he admitted; "but there is a most insidious enemy with which he has to contend." "An enemy?" repeated the judge, anxiously. "My dear sir," said Mr. Moseley, sinking his voice to husky solemnity, "the boy is stung by the tarantula of athletics!"