CHAPTER VIII
KATE OF THE SHORE
It was, I think, ten days after Agnes Anne had left us for the old house of the Maitlands when she came to me at the school-house. My father had Fred Esquillant in with him, and the two were busy with Sophocles. I was sitting dreaming with a book of old plays in my hand when Agnes Anne came in.
“Duncan,” she said, “I am feared to bide this night at Marnhoul. And I think so is Miss Irma. Now I would rather not tell grandmother—so you must come!”
“Feared?” said I; “surely you never mean ghosts—and such nonsense, Agnes Anne—and you the daughter of a school-master!”
“It’s the solid ghosts I am feared of,” said Agnes Anne; “haste you, and ask leave of father. He is so busy, he will never notice. He has Freddy in with him, I hear.”
So Agnes Anne and I went in together. We could see the man’s head and the boy’s bent close together, and turned from us so that the westering light could fall upon their books. Fred Esquillant was to be a great scholar and to do my father infinite credit when he went to the university. For me I was only a reader of English, a scribbler of verses in that language, a paltry essayist, with no sense of the mathematics and no more than an average classic. Therefore in the school I was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water to my father.
“Duncan is coming with me to bide the night at Marnhoul,” said Agnes Anne, “and he is going to take ‘King George’ with him to—scare the foxes!”