ly performed. Nor is
the result at all easy to put into words. It is best shown in actions.

Again, it may appear rather strange that Robert should be able to talk
in such an easy manner to his grandmother, seeing he had been guilty
of concealment, if not of deception. But she had never been so actively
severe towards Robert as she had been towards her own children. To him
she was wonderfully gentle for her nature, and sought to exercise the
saving harshness which she still believed necessary, solely in keeping
from him every enjoyment of life which the narrowest theories as to
the rule and will of God could set down as worldly. Frivolity, of
which there was little in this sober boy, was in her eyes a vice; loud
laughter almost a crime; cards, and novelles, as she called them, were
such in her estimation, as to be beyond my powers of characterization.
Her commonest injunction was, 'Noo be douce,'--that is sober--uttered
to the soberest boy she could ever have known. But Robert was a
large-hearted boy, else this life would never have had to be written;
and so, through all this, his deepest nature came into unconscious
contact with that of his noble old grandmother. There was nothing small
about either of them. Hence Robert was not afraid of her. He had got
more of her nature in him than of her son's. She and his own mother had
more share in him than his father, though from him he inherited good
qualities likewise.

He had concealed his doings with Shargar simply because he believed they
could not be done if his grandmother knew of his plans. Herein he did
her less than justice. But so unpleasant was concealment to his nature,
and so much did the dread of discovery press upon him, that the moment
he saw the thing had come out into the daylight of her knowledge, such a
reaction of relief took place as, operating along with his deep natural
humour and the comical circumstance of the case, gave him an ease and
freedom of communication which he had never before enjoyed with her.
Likewise there was a certain courage in the boy which, if his own
natural disposition had not been so quiet that he felt the negations
of her rule the less, might have resulted in underhand doings of a very
different kind, possibly, from those of benevolence.

He must have been a strange being to look at, I always think, at this
point of his development, with his huge nose, his black eyes, his lanky
figure, and his sober countenance, on which a smil