“No, it is mine. She took it out of my bed-room, and has kept it ever since.”
“Is she as fond as you of books?”
“She is a great reader,” he answered with a smile that seemed like an admission of my peculiar right to make these enquiries. “I am sometimes quite astonished by the information she possesses in directions which even professed students find too dry and uninviting to pursue.”
“Good gracious!” I thought, “what a delusion he is labouring under! I would bet a hundred pounds Theresa couldn’t write a dozen lines that shouldn’t contain half as many blunders.”
Thus conversing, we reached the stables, where I found three fine horses, one of which he pointed out as his daughter’s. This supplied him with a text for a long discourse on the subject of breeding horses; he then branched off into topics connected with the Stock Exchange, and finally, after an absence of nearly an hour, reconducted me to the house.
CHAPTER V.
“’Twas night, calm night, the moon was high.”
Ancient Mariner.