CHAPTER LVIII.
THE ENCHANTED GARDEN.
Marjory Trevellian was what is accounted among her class “a good scholar,” and she had taught the little boy to read and write, to “say his tables,” and to “cypher,” as she termed the initiatory arithmetical exercises.
It was plain, however, that the boy was not abandoned to chance, but that an eye was upon him, and some friendly, if not conscientious direction, controlling his destiny.
In one of his visits Tom Orange handed her a letter, written in the same neat clerk’s hand in which the short memorandum that accompanied each remittance was penned. Having read the letter she was thoughtful.
When Tom had gone away, she said—
“You are to be taught like a gentleman, as you are, my darling, and you’re not to be sent to school for three or four years, and in the meantime Mr. Wharton—he’s a kind, good gentleman—is to teach you for two hours every evening after the school is over. You know his house. It is about a mile away from this; just half-way on the road to the grammar school.”
“But I’m to live at home, Granny, all the same?” inquired the boy in great trepidation.
“Lord love it, to be sure he is,” she answered, beaming on him with great affection. “Only two hours, and every one likes Mr. Wharton, and I’m desired to go to his house to take his orders, to-morrow.”
So she did, and the new order of things was established with very little disturbance of the old.
The narrow road which the boy every afternoon passed to and from Doctor Wharton’s house makes, about half-way, a sudden curve. It is a wooded road, not without little ups and downs, and formidable ruts, and blocks of worn old stone, so large as to shock all the rules of modern road-making.