My lessons went on as usual. A certain pride enabled me to learn them tolerably for a day or two; but when that faded, my whole being began to flag. For some time my existence was a kind of life in death. At length one evening my uncle said to me, as we finished my lessons far from satisfactorily-- ‘Willie, your aunt and I think it better you should go to school. We shall be very sorry to part with you, but it will be better. You will then have companions of your own age. You have not enough to amuse you at home.’ He did not allude by a single word to the affair of the watch. Could my aunt have taken it, and never told him? It was not likely. I was delighted at the idea of any change, for my life had grown irksome to me. ‘Oh, thank you, uncle!’ I cried, with genuine expression. I think he looked a little sad; but he uttered no reproach. My aunt and he had already arranged everything. The next day but one, I saw, for the first time, a carriage drive up to the door of the house. I was waiting for it impatiently. My new clothes had all been packed in a little box. I had not put in a single toy: I cared for nothing I had now. The box was put up beside the driver. My aunt came to the door where I was waiting for my uncle. ‘Mayn’t I go and say good-bye to grannie?’ I asked. ‘She’s not very well to-day,’ said my aunt. ‘I think you had better not. You will be back at Christmas, you know.’ I was not so much grieved as I ought to have been. The loss of my watch had made the thought of grannie painful again. ‘Your uncle will meet you at the road,’ continued my aunt, seeing me still hesitate. ‘Good-bye.’ I received her cold embrace without emotion, clambered into the chaise, and looking out as the driver shut the door, wondered what my aunt was holding her apron to her eyes for, as she turned away into the house. My uncle met us and got in, and away the chaise rattled, bearing me towards an utterly new experience; for hardly could the strangest region in foreign lands be more unknown to the wandering mariner than the faces and ways of even my own kind were to me. I had never played for one half-hour with boy or girl. I knew nothing of their play-things or their games. I hardly knew what boys were like, except, outwardly, from the dim reflex of myself in the broken mirror in my bed-room, whose lustre was more of the ice than the pool, and, inwardly, from the partly exceptional experiences of my own nature, with which even I was poorly enough acquainted. CHAPTER VIII. I GO TO SCHOOL, AND GRANNIE LEAVES IT. It is an evil thing to break up a family before the natural period of its dissolution. In the course of things, marriage, the necessities of maintenance, or the energies of labour guiding ‘to fresh woods and pastures new,’ are the ordered causes of separation.