“I wantit to gie ye a surprise, Maister Cosmo. Divna ye min’ tellin’ me ance ’at ye saw no rizzon hoo a lassie sudna un’erstan’ jist as weel ’s a laddie? I wantit to see whether ye was richt or wrang; an’ as algebra luiket the maist oonlikly thing, I thoucht I wad taikle that, an’ sae sattle the queston at ance. But, eh me! I’m sair feart ye was i’ the wrang, Cosmo!” “I maun du my best to pruv mysel’ i’ the richt,” returned Cosmo. “I never said onybody cud learn a’ o’ themsel’s, wantin’ help, ye ken. There’s nae mony laddies cud du that, an’ feower still wad try.” They sat down together at the table, and in half an hour or so, Aggie had begun to see the faint light of at least the false dawn, as they call it, through the thickets of algebra. It was nearly midnight when Cosmo rose, and then Aggie would not let him go alone, but insisted on accompanying him to the gate of the court. It was a curious relation between the two. While Agnes looked up to Cosmo, about two years her junior, as immeasurably her superior in all that pertained to the intellect and its range, she assumed over him a sort of general human superiority, something like that a mother will assert over the most gifted of sons. One has seen, with a kind of sacred amusement, the high priest of many literary and artistic circles, set down with rebuke by his mother, as if he had been still a boy! And I have heard the children of this world speak with like superiority of the child of light whom they loved--allowing him wondrous good, but regarding him as a kind of God’s chicken: nothing is so mysterious to the children of this world as the ways of the children of light, though to themselves they seem simple enough. That Agnes never treated Cosmo with this degree of protective condescension, arose from the fact that she was very nearly as much a child of light as he; only, being a woman, she was keener of perception, and being older, felt the more of the mother that every woman feels, and made the most of it. It was to her therefore a merely natural thing to act his protector. Indeed with respect to the Warlock family in general, she counted herself possessed of the right to serve any one of them to the last drop of her blood. From infancy she had heard the laird spoken of--without definite distinction between the present and the last--as the noblest, best, and kindest of men, as the power which had been for generations over the family of the Gracies, for their help and healing; and hence it was impressed upon her deepest consciousness, that one of the main reasons of her existence was her relation to the family of Glenwarlock.