'What did he teach you?'

Now Esther felt no more congeniality than her father did with this
handsome, stately, commanding woman. Yet it would have been impossible
to the girl to say why she had an instant unwillingness to answer this
simple question. She did not answer it, except under protest.

'It began with the coins,' she said vaguely. 'He said we would study
history with them.'

'And did you?'

'Yes, ma'am.'

'How did you manage it? or how did he? He has original ways of doing
things.'

'Yes, ma'am. We used to take only one or two of the coins at once, and
then Pitt told me what to read.'

'What did he tell you to read?'

'A great many different books, at different times.'

'But tell Mrs. Dallas what books, Esther,' her father put in.

'There were so many, papa. Gibbon's History, and Plutarch's Lives, and
Rollin, and Vertot and Hume, and I--forget some of them.'

'How much of all these did you really read, Esther?'

'I don't know, ma'am. I read what he told me.'

The lady turned to Colonel Gainsborough with a peculiar smile. 'Sounds
rather heterogeneous!' she said.

It was on Esther's lips to justify her teacher, and say how far from
heterogeneous, how connected, and how thorough, and how methodical, the
reading and the study had been; and how enriched with talk and
explanations and descriptions and discussions. How delightful those
conversations were, both to herself and Pitt; how living the truth had
been made; how had names and facts taken on them the shape and
colouring of nature and reality. It rushed back upon Esther, and her
lips opened; and then, an inexplicable feeling of something like
caution came down upon her, and she shut her lips again.

'It was harmless amusement,' remarked the colonel carelessly.

Whether the mother thought that, may be questioned. She looked again at
the child standing before her; a child truly, with childlike innocence
and ignorance in her large eyes and pure lips. But the eyes were eyes
of beauty; and the lips would soon and readily take to themselves the
sweetness and the consciousness of womanhood, and a new bloom would
come upon the cheek. The colonel had never yet looked forward to all
that; but the wise eyes of the matron saw it as well as if already
before her. This little girl might well by and by be dangerous. If Mrs.
Dallas had come as a friend, she went away, in a sort, as an enemy, in
so far, at least, as Esther's further and future relations wi