of her curtseys which were extraordinary taking. "If
you will be cross," said she, "I must be making pretty manners at you,
Davie. I will be very obedient, as I should be when every stitch upon
all there is of me belongs to you. But you will not be very cross
either, because now I have not anyone else."

This struck me hard, and I made haste, in a kind of penitence, to blot
out all the good effect of my last speech. In this direction, progress
was more easy, being down hill; she led me forward, smiling; at the
sight of her, in the brightness of the fire and with her pretty becks
and looks, my heart was altogether melted. We made our meal with
infinite mirth and tenderness; and the two seemed to be commingled into
one, so that our very laughter sounded like a kindness.

In the midst of which I awoke to better recollections, made a lame word
of excuse, and set myself boorishly to my studies. It was a substantial,
instructive book that I had bought, by the late Dr. Heineccius, in which
I was to do a great deal of reading these next days, and often very glad
that I had no one to question me of what I read. Methought she bit her
lip at me a little, and that cut me. Indeed it left her wholly solitary,
the more as she was very little of a reader, and had never a book. But
what was I to do?

So the rest of the evening flowed by almost without speech.

I could have beat myself. I could not lie in my bed that night for rage
and repentance, but walked to and fro on my bare feet till I was nearly
perished, for the chimney was gone out and the frost keen. The thought
of her in the next room, the thought that she might even hear me as I
walked, the remembrance of my churlishness and that I must continue to
practise the same ungrateful course or be dishonoured, put me beside my
reason. I stood like a man between Scylla and Charybdis: _What must she
think of me_? was my one thought that softened me continually into
weakness. _What is to become of us_? the other which steeled me again to
resolution. This was my first night of wakefulness and divided counsels,
of which I was now to pass many, pacing like a madman, sometimes weeping
like a childish boy, sometimes praying (I would fain hope) like a
Christian.

But prayer is not very difficult, and the hitch comes in practice. In
her presence, and above all if I allowed any beginning of familiarity, I
found I had very little command of what should follow. But to sit all
day in the sam