ses." Finding him
inexorable, Ruth began to parley. "I don't want to see Mr. Silk.
But if I come down to you, it will not be to play. We'll creep off to
the Well, or somewhere out of hail, and there you must let me read--or
perhaps I'll read aloud to you. Promise?"

"What're you reading?"

"The Bible."

Dicky pulled a face. "Well, the Bible's English, anyway," he said
resignedly. The sound of a foreign tongue always made him feel
pugnacious, and it was ever a question with him how, as a gentleman, to
treat a dead language. Death was respectable, but had its own
obligations; obligations which Greek and Latin somehow ignored.

The house, known as Sabines, stood high on the slope of the midmost of
Boston's three hills, in five acres of ground well set with elms.
Captain Vyell had purchased the site some five years before, and had
built himself a retreat away from the traffic that surged about his
official residence by the waterside. Of its raucous noises very few--
the rattle of a hawser maybe, or a boatswain's whistle, or the yells of
some stentorian pilot--reached to penetrate the belt of elms surrounding
the house and its green garth; but the Collector had pierced this
woodland with bold vistas through which the eye overlooked Boston
harbour with its moving panorama of vessels, the old fort then standing
where now stands the Navy Yard, and the broad waters of the Charles
sweeping out to the Bay.

For eighteen months he, the master of this demesne, had not set foot
within its front gate; not once since the day when on a sudden
resolution he had installed Ruth Josselin here, under ward of Miss
Quiney, to be visited and instructed in theology, the arts, and the
sciences, by such teachers as that unparagoned spinster might, with his
approval, select. In practice he left it entirely to her, and Miss
Quiney's taste in teachers was of the austerest. What nutriment
(one might well have asked) could a young mind extract from the husks of
doctrine and of grammar purveyed to Ruth by the Reverend Malachi
Hichens, her tutor in the Holy Scriptures and in the languages of Greece
and Rome?

The answer is that youth, when youth craves for it, will draw knowledge
even from the empty air and drink it through the very pores of the skin.
Mr. Hichens might be dry--inhumanly dry--and his methods repellent; but
there were the books, after all, and the books held food for her hunger,
wine for her thirst. So too the harpsich