The two walked side by side along the snowy path, the lantern flashing fitfully amongst the bare branches and dark boles of the trees. Monteith chatted away pleasantly, but Scotty answered only in monosyllables. He was employed in making desperate efforts to bring about some allusion to the condition of the schoolhouse. But the new master seemed to have totally forgotten school affairs, and when they came to the end of the forest path and stood upon the Glenoro road, saying good-night, this strange man had not in the smallest way recurred to the shameful subject. Scotty was in despair. "It would be a fool's trick we were doing!" he burst forth, as Monteith held out his hand in farewell, "if we could jist be having another day----" He stopped overcome. The new master did not seem to need an explanation of this apparently irrelevant speech. "Could you fix it all up in one day?" he inquired in a business-like manner. "Oh, yes!" Scotty gasped eagerly, "easy." "All right, we'll take to-morrow; I'll come over and help you. Good-night!" And he turned away, leaving his pupil standing in the middle of the road amazed and humbled. Number Nine learned during the following week that for some inexplicable reason the MacDonalds, whose hand had hitherto been against every other man's hand, were on the side of the new master, and that anyone who gave him trouble was courting dire calamities at the hands of Big Malcolm's Scot. As a direct result the fiat went forth that Dan Murphy, and consequently all his generation, also approved of the new rule. Subsequently the Tenth announced its neutrality; and from that time the new era, which had arisen at the building of the church in the social world of the Oro valley, dawned in the schoolhouse too, and the land had rest from war. To no one did the new dispensation bring greater things than to Scotty. Ever since the days when all knowledge and wisdom could be extracted, by persistent questionings, from Hamish, he had experienced an unslakable thirst for books. He had been much more fortunate in finding reading material than his uncle had been, for Captain Herbert's library was always at Scotty's disposal. Every summer and winter Isabel came to Kirsty's laden with books, and what feasts she and Scotty had reading under the boughs of the Silver Maple or before Kirsty's fire! Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Macaulay--they devoured them all; and once, by mistake, she had brought some books by a wonderful man named Carlyle, which she declared were dreadfully stupid, but which Scotty found strangely fascinating, though somewhat beyond his understanding. But Isabel had been away at school for more than a year now, and though she wrote Scotty voluminous letters, which he answered at shamefully long intervals, and only when Kirsty's reproaches goaded him to the effort, she had almost entirely passed out of his life.