quietly: "Read a page or two aloud, translating as you go. You
used to like that try it again."

Rose obeyed and went glibly down a page, doing her best to give the
sense in her purest English. Presently she went more slowly, then
skipped a sentence here and there, and finally stopped short, looking as
if she needed a screen again.

"What's the matter?" asked her uncle, who had been watching her with a
serious eye.

"Some phrases are untranslatable, and it only spoils them to try. They
are not amiss in French, but sound coarse and bad in our blunt English,"
she said a little pettishly, for she felt annoyed by her failure to
prove the contested point.

"Ah, my dear, if the fine phrases won't bear putting into honest
English, the thoughts they express won't bear putting into your innocent
mind! That chapter is the key to the whole book, and if you had been led
up, or rather down, to it artfully and artistically, you might have
read it to yourself without seeing how bad it is. All the worse for the
undeniable talent which hides the evil so subtly and makes the danger so
delightful."

He paused a moment, then added with an anxious glance at the book, over
which she was still bending, "Finish it if you choose only remember, my
girl, that one may read at forty what is unsafe at twenty, and that we
never can be too careful what food we give that precious yet perilous
thing called imagination."

And taking his Review, he went away to look over a learned article which
interested him much less than the workings of a young mind nearby.

Another long silence, broken only by an occasional excited bounce from
Jamie when the sociable cuttlefish looked in at the windows or the
Nautilus scuttled a ship or two in its terrific course. A bell rang, and
the doctor popped his head out to see if he was wanted. It was only a
message for Aunt Plenty, and he was about to pop in again when his eye
was caught by a square parcel on the slab.

"What's this?" he asked, taking it up.

"Rose wants me to leave it at Kitty Van's when I go. I forgot to bring
her book from Mama, so I shall go and get it as soon as ever I've done
this," replied Jamie from his nest.

As the volume in his hands was a corpulent one, and Jamie only a third
of the way through, Dr. Alec thought Rose's prospect rather doubtful
and, slipping the parcel into his pocket, he walked away, saying with a
satisfied air: "Virtue doesn't always get rewarded, but it shall be this