“Oh, Rodie, my mother’s gathering coal!” cried Elsie, hastening to extinguish the fiery sparks that had fallen upon the large fur rug before the fire. “Well,” she said, serenely, in a tone which would have disposed summarily, had he heard it, of poor Frank’s hopes, “you are big enough to have done it: but I would not lift my hands, if I were you, on one that was not as big as myself. And what has Frank done? for he never was, that I could see, a quarrelling boy.” “Oh, not that you could see!” said Rodie, with a snort. “He’s sure to keep a good face before the lassies, and especially you that he’s courting, or trying to court, if he knew the way.” “He’s not courting me,” cried Elsie, with a blush and a laugh, giving Rodie a sisterly push, “and I wonder you will say such things to me.” “It’s only because he doesna know the way then,” said Rodie, picking up the pieces of blazing coal from the white hearth. “Will you let me alone, when you see I have the tongs in my hand?” “Was it for that you quarrelled with Frank?” said Elsie, letting a little careless scorn appear in her tone, as who should say, you might quarrel with many besides Frank if that was the cause. The girls in St. Rule’s, in those days, were not so disproportionate in number as they seem to be now, and she was unpopular, indeed, who had not one or two, at least, competing for her smiles. “It was not for that!” cried Rodie, expressing, on his side, a scornful conviction that anything so unimportant was not worth quarrelling about. And then he added, “Do ye mind, Elsie, yon day in the turret-room?” “Oh, I mind it very well,” cried Elsie, with a little start; “I have always minded it. I think of it sometimes in the middle of the night when I wake up and cannot get to sleep.” “I cannot see what good it can do thinking of it then,” said Rodie, always contemptuous of the ways of lassies. “But you mind how my father went on about the unjust steward. It was awfully funny the way he went on.” “It was for his sermon,” said Elsie, with a little trouble in her eyes. “It was not for his sermon. I heard him preach that sermon after, and I just listened, minding yon afternoon. But there was not a word in it about taking your bill, and writing fourscore.” “Oh, Rodie, you couldn’t remember it as well as all that!” “Why shouldn’t I remember? I was a big laddie. I remember heaps of things. I mind going to Kinghorn, and crossing in the smack to Leith, years and years before.” “That was different from hearing a sermon,” said Elsie, with the superiority to sermons which a minister’s daughter naturally possessed.