“No, no; I don't want more of it. I can't see you, and don't know who you are; but please take the book, and lay it on the middle table in the library. It may be hurt, and I don't want to come down just yet.” “Very well, miss!” answered Richard; “I will.--The fall from such a height, and through all those branches, must have done it quite enough harm already!” “Oh!--I never thought of that!” said the voice. Richard took up the book, and walked away with it, pondering. “Is it possible,” he said to himself, “that the little lady, whose big mare I shod last year, is up there in that tree? It must be her voice!--I cannot, surely, be mistaken!--But how on earth, or rather how in heaven, did she get up? Yet why shouldn't she climb as well as any other? It must be as easy as riding that huge mare. And then she's not like other ladies! She's not of the ordinary breed of this planet! Which of them would have spoken to a blacksmith-lad as she spoke to me! Who but herself would have tied up a scratch in a working man's hand!” He was right so far: she could climb as no other in that county, no other, perhaps, in England, man or boy or girl, could climb. She was like a squirrel at climbing; and for the last few mornings, the weather having grown decidedly summery, had gone before breakfast to say her prayers in that tree. Richard carried the book to the house--it was Pope's Letters--found his way to the library, and laid it where she said, hoping she would come to seek it, and that he might then be present. Would she recognize the fellow that shod her mare? he wondered. He could do nothing till he knew where he was to work, and therefore, after breakfast in the servants' hall, he asked one of the men to let him know when Mr. Lestrange would see him, and went to his room. Richard had not yet become aware of any moral pressure. The duty of aspiration or self-conquest, had never in any shape been forced upon him, and his conscience had not made him acquainted with it. What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest; but Richard's was not of that sort, and yet was very much at ease. I may say for him that he had done nothing he knew to be bad at the moment; and very little that he had to be ashamed of afterwards, either at school or since he left it. Partly through the care of his parents, he had never got into what is called bad company, had formed no undesirable intimacies. He had a natural cleanliness, a natural sense of the becoming, which did much to keep him from evil: he could not consent to regard himself with disgust, and he would have been easily disgusted with himself. If he did not, as I have indicated, set himself with any conscious effort to rise above himself, he did do something against sinking below himself. The books he chose were almost all of the better sort. He had instinctively laid aside some in which he recognized a degrading influence.