"You could tell, I suppose, for it seemed as if you were reading. It is foreign language, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"And you can read it?"
"Yes!"
"But how—where did you get so much learning?"
Jacob did not hear her. He was lost in profound thought, striving to search out some clue which would reveal the motives of that evil man for the interest he had taken in Robert Otis.
"And these were all my nephew studied?" he said, at length, still pondering upon what had been told him.
"No, not all. Those were the books; but then Mr. Leicester thought a good deal of music and drawing, but most of all, writing. Hours and hours he would spend over that. Every kind of writing, not coarse hand and fine hand as you and I learned to write—but everything was given him to copy. Old letters, names. I remember he practised one whole month writing over different names from a great pile of letters that Mr. Leicester brought for copies."
"Ha!" ejaculated Jacob Strong, now keenly interested, "so he was taught to copy these names?"