he read with Merthyr. Now, this
morning how was she to appear to him? There would be no reading, of
course. How could he think of teaching one to whom he trembled. Emilia
trusted that she might see no change in him, and, above all, that he
would not speak of his love for her. Nevertheless, she put on her robe
of conquest, having first rejected with distaste a plainer garb. She
went down the stairs slowly. Merthyr was in the library awaiting her.
"You are late," he said, eyeing the dress as a thing apart from her, and
remarking that it was hardly suited for morning wear. "Yellow, if you
must have a strong colour, and you wouldn't exhibit the schwartz-gelb of
the Tedeschi willingly. But now!"

This was the signal for the reading to commence.

"Wilfrid would not have been so cold to me," thought Emilia, turning the
leaves of Ariosto as a book of ashes. Not a word of love appeared to be
in his mind. This she did not regret; but she thirsted for the assuring
look. His eyes were quietly friendly. So friendly was he, that he blamed
her for inattention, and took her once to task about a melodious accent
in which she vulgarized the vowels. All the flattery of the Branciani
dress could not keep Emilia from her feeling of smallness. Was it
possible that he loved her? She watched him as eagerly as her shyness
would permit. Any shadow of a change was spied for. Getting no softness
from him, or superadded kindness, no shadow of a change in that
direction, she stumbled in her reading purposely, to draw down rebuke;
her construing was villanously bad. He told her so, and she replied: "I
don't like poetry." But seeing him exchange Ariosto for Roman History,
she murmured, "I like Dante." Merthyr plunged her remorselessly into the
second Punic war.

But there was worse to follow. She was informed that after breakfast she
would be called upon to repeat the principal facts she had been reading
of. Emilia groaned audibly.

"Take the book," said Merthyr.

"It's so heavy," she complained.

"Heavy?"

"I mean, to carry about."

"If you want to 'carry it about,' the boy shall follow you with it."

She understood that she was being laughed at. Languor, coupled with the
consciousness of ridicule, overwhelmed her.

"I feel I can't learn," she said.

"Feel, that you must," was replied to her.

"No; don't take any more trouble with me!"

"Yes; I expect you to distinguish Scipio from Cicero, and not make the
mistake of the other evenin