ue, but here William
Douglas had interfered. "Teach her Latin if you like, but not Greek," he
said. "It would injure the child--make what is called a blue-stocking of
her, I suppose--and it is my duty to stand between her and injury."

"Ah! ah! you want to make a belle of her, do you?" said the cheery
chaplain.

[Illustration: "AS SHE BENT OVER THE OLD VOLUME."]

"I said it was my duty; I did not say it was my wish," replied the
moody father. "If I could have my wish, Anne should never know what a
lover is all her life long."

"What! you do not wish to have her marry, then? There are happy
marriages. Come, Douglas, don't be morbid."

"I know what men are. And you and I are no better."

"But she may love."

"Ah! there it is; she may. And that is what I meant when I said that it
was my duty to keep her from making herself positively unattractive."

"Greek need not do that," said Dr. Gaston, shortly.

"It need not, but it does. Let me ask you one question: did you ever
fall in love, or come anywhere near falling in love, with a girl who
understood Greek?"

"That is because only the homely ones take to it," replied the chaplain,
fencing a little.

But Anne was not taught Greek. After Cicero she took up algebra, then
astronomy. After that she read aloud from a ponderous Shakspeare, and
the old man corrected her accentuation, and questioned her on the
meanings. A number of the grand old plays the girl knew almost entirely
by heart; they had been her reading-books from childhood. The
down-pouring light of the vivid morning sunshine and the up-coming white
glare of the ice below met and shone full upon her face and figure as
she bent over the old volume laid open on the table before her, one hand
supporting her brow, the other resting on the yellow page. Her hands
were firm, white, and beautifully shaped--strong hands, generous hands,
faithful hands; not the little, idle, characterless, faithless palms so
common in America, small, dainty, delicate, and shapeless, coming from a
composite origin. Her thick hair, brown as a mellowed chestnut, with a
gleam of dark red where the light touched it, like the red of November
oak leaves, was, as usual, in her way, the heavy braids breaking from
the coil at the back of her head, one by one, as she read on through
_Hamlet_. At last impatiently she drew out the comb, and they all fell
down over her shoulders, and left her in momentary peace.

The lesson was nearly over when R