“Oh! but they are different,” said the child, a sudden shadow falling on her face. “If I could run about as they can, I would maybe no’ care about other things.”
“Puir wee lammie!” said the mistress.
“Oh! but I’m better than I used to be,” said Marjorie, eagerly; “a great deal better. And I’ll maybe be well and strong some day, our Allie says.”
“God grant it, my dear,” said the mistress reverently.
“And I have some things to enjoy that the other bairns havena. See, I have gotten a fine new book here,” said Marjorie, mindful of her mother’s warning about speaking much of her trouble to other folk. “It’s a book my father brought home to my mother the last time he was away. I might read a bit of it to you.”
“Ay, do ye that. I will like weel to hear you.”
It was “The Course of Time,” a comparatively new book in those days, and one would think a dreary enough one for a child. It was a grand book to listen to, when her mother read it to her father, Marjorie thought, and she liked the sound of some of it even when she read it to herself. And it was the sound of it that the mistress liked as she listened, at least she was not thinking of the sense, but of the ease and readiness with which the long words glided from the child’s lips. It was about “the sceptic” that she was reading—the man who had striven to make this fair and lovely earth.
“A cold and fatherless, forsaken thing that wandered on forlorn, undestined, unaccompanied, unupheld”; and the mistress had a secret fear that if the child should stumble among the long words and ask for help, she might not be able to give it without consideration.
“Ay, it has a fine sound,” said she, as Marjorie made a pause. “But I wad ken better how ye’re comin’ on wi’ your readin’ gin ye were to tak’ the New Testament.”
There was a tradition among the old scholars that, in the early days of her experience as a teacher, the mistress used to make a little pause before committing herself in the utterance of some of the long words in the Bible; if it were so, that time was long past. But before Marjorie had opened the book, Allison came in, to mend the fire and put things to rights; and as the books had only been intended as a diversion from unpleasant possibilities, they were gladly and quickly put aside.