ing for the carriage in which to go to the station to meet
some particularly important week-end guest. He asked if she had brought
any answer to his note to Mr. Knight, and she told him that she had
left it in the schoolroom, as she called the refectory, because he was
out.

"I hope he will get it," grumbled Mr. Blake. "One of my friends who is
coming down to-night thinks he understands architecture and I want the
parson to show him over the Abbey House. Indeed that's why he has come,
for you see he is an American who thinks a lot of such old things."

"Well, it is beautiful, isn't it, Father?" she said. "Even I felt that
it would be easy to learn in that big old room with a roof like that of
a church."

An idea struck him.

"Would you like to go to school there, Isobel?"

"I think so, Father, as I must go to school somewhere and I hate those
horrible governesses."

"Well," he replied, "you couldn't throw inkpots at the holy Knight, as
you did at Miss Hook. Lord! what a rage she was in," he added with a
chuckle. "I had to pay her L5 for a new dress. But it was better to do
that than to risk a County Court action."

Then the carriage came and he departed.

The upshot of it all was that Isobel became another of Mr. Knight's
pupils. When Mr. Blake suggested the arrangement to his wife, she
raised certain objections, among them that associating with these
little lads might make a tomboy of the girl, adding that she had been
taught with children of her own sex. He retorted in his rough marital
fashion, that if it made something different of Isobel to what she, the
mother, was, he would be glad. Indeed, as usual, Lady Jane's opposition
settled the matter.

Now for the next few years of Isobel's life there is little to be told.
Mr. Knight was an able man and a good teacher, and being a clever girl
she learned a great deal from him, especially in the way of
mathematics, for which, as has been said, she had a natural leaning.

Indeed very soon she outstripped Godfrey and the other lads in this and
sundry other branches of study, sitting at a table by herself on what
once had been the dais of the old hall. In the intervals of lessons,
however, it was their custom to take walks together and then it was
that she always found herself at the side of Godfrey. Indeed they
became inseparable, at any rate in mind. A strange and most uncommon
intimacy existed between these young creatures, almost might it have
been ca