'I will keep it for you, if you like,' she said, for she could not bear
to refuse it.

'Na, mem; I want ye to keep it to yersel'; for I'm sure my mamma wad hae
likit you to hae 't better nor ony ither body.'

'Well, I will use it sometimes for your sake. But mind, I will not take
it from you; I will only keep it for you.'

'Weel, weel, mem; gin ye'll keep it till I speir for 't, that'll du weel
eneuch,' answered Robert, with a smile.

He laboured diligently; and his progress corresponded to his labour.
It was more than intellect that guided him: Falconer had genius for
whatever he cared for.

Meantime the love he bore his teacher, and the influence of her beauty,
began to mould him, in his kind and degree, after her likeness, so that
he grew nice in his person and dress, and smoothed the roughness and
moderated the broadness of his speech with the amenities of the English
which she made so sweet upon her tongue. He became still more obedient
to his grandmother, and more diligent at school; gathered to himself
golden opinions without knowing it, and was gradually developing into a
rustic gentleman.

Nor did the piano absorb all his faculties. Every divine influence tends
to the rounded perfection of the whole. His love of Nature grew more
rapidly. Hitherto it was only in summer that he had felt the presence of
a power in her and yet above her: in winter, now, the sky was true and
deep, though the world was waste and sad; and the tones of the wind
that roared at night about the goddess-haunted house, and moaned in the
chimneys of the lowly dwelling that nestled against it, woke harmonies
within him which already he tried to spell out falteringly. Miss St.
John began to find that he put expressions of his own into the simple
things she gave him to play, and even dreamed a little at his own will
when alone with the passive instrument. Little did Mrs. Falconer think
into what a seventh heaven of accursed music she had driven her boy.

But not yet did he tell his friend, much as he loved and much as he
trusted her, the little he knew of his mother's sorrows and his father's
sins, or whose the hand that had struck him when she found him lying in
the waste factory.

For a time almost all his trouble about God went from him. Nor do I
think that this was only because he rarely thought of him at all: God
gave him of himself in Miss St. John. But words dropped now and then
from off the shelves where his old difficulties la