“Me! what do I know?” she said. “I have not been at the college, like you. I have never learned anything;” and, for almost the first time, it occurred to Margaret that there might be some reason in the animadversions and lamentations over her ignorance, of her sisters Grace and Jean.
“You know things without learning.”
“Oh!—but you are making a fool of me, like papa,” cried Margaret. “And what are you doing now, if you are not a minister? You have never been back again till now at the Farm?”
“I am doing just nothing, that is the worst of it. I cannot dig, and to beg I am ashamed.”
“Beg!” She looked at him with a merry laugh. He was what Bell would have called “very well put on.” Margaret saw, by instinct, though she was without any experience, that Rob Glen could not have been a gentleman; but yet he was well dressed, and very superior to everybody else about the Kirkton. “I suppose you have come home on a visit, and to rest.”
“Yes; but, Miss Margaret, all this time your foot is wet and your hand is scratched. Will you come to the house? Shall I go and get you dry shoes from Bell? What can I do?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Margaret; “do you think I never got my feet wet before? I will change them when I get in. But I think I will go home now. What have you been doing? Oh, drawing!” she exclaimed, with a cry of delight. She seized the book which he half showed, half withdrew. “Oh, I should like to see it—it is the Kirkton! Oh, I would like to draw like that! Oh,” cried Margaret, with a deep-drawn breath, and all her heart in it, “what I would give!” and then she remembered that she had nothing to give, and stopped short, her lips half open, her eyes aflame.
“Will you let me show you how to do it? It would make me so happy. It is as easy as possible. You have only to try.”
Margaret did not make any reply in her eagerness. She turned over the book with delight. The sketches were not badly done. There was the Kirkton, breezy and sunny, with its cold tones of blue; there were all the glimpses of Earl’s-hall that could be had at a distance; there was the estuary and the sand-banks, and the old pale city on the headland. But Margaret had never come across anything in the shape of an artist before, and this new capability burst upon her as something more enviable, more delightful than any occupation she had as yet ever known.
“I have a great many more,” said the young man. “If you will come to the house, or here to the burn to-morrow, I will show you some that are better than these.”