“Miranda is dreadfully dull at learning, though quick at everything else,” sighed Alicia, when confiding her new trouble to Robin. “She, an English-born woman nearly sixteen years old, will not master the English alphabet.”
“Why not try the Gurmuki?”[[10]] suggested Robin; “it will be easier for one who knows no language but Panjabi to learn the familiar sounds.”
[10]. Gurmuki is the character in which Panjabi is usually written.
“I do not know the Gurmuki alphabet myself,” observed Alicia, with a slight shrug of her shoulders.
“Oh! I’ll teach you both, if you will be my pupils,” cried Robin. “Kripá Dé would have taught you better, no doubt; but as we’ve sent him off to Lahore for safety and further education, you must accept me as a master in default of a better. Premi is too shy of Harold to learn from him.”
It was true that Premi was less painfully bashful with Robin than with either his father or brother. Mr. Hartley was to her the buzurg (elder)—reverenced but feared; Harold was the Padre Sahib, in whose presence the shy young creature always drew her chaddar over her face; but Robin was a privileged person with Premi as with every one else. She knew that he, like herself, had risked life to save Kripá Dé; she looked on him as her old playmate’s bhai, or brother, and even spoke of him by that name. Robin once laughingly observed that Miss Miranda Macfinnis did not regard him as one of the lords of creation at all, but as a big, good-natured, shaggy dog, whom she did not expect to bite her.
So, under his tuition, Gurmuki lessons were begun, and Alicia was surprised to find that Premi learned more rapidly than herself, and with keener enjoyment.
“Does Miranda know her own early history? is she aware that she has relations in England?” Harold inquired one day of his wife.
“She does not know much. You see, dearest, that I am scarcely strong enough yet in Urdu to tell a long, complicated story.”
“Robin had better tell her. Miranda does not seem shy with him,” observed Harold.