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The road as it climbed above the town toward Sabines grew rough and full of pitfalls. Even by the light of the full moon shining between the elms Miss Quiney's chairmen were forced to pick their way warily, so that the couple on the side-walk which in comparison was well paved easily kept abreast of them. Ruth walked with the free grace of a Dryad.
Miss Quiney had used pious words; in Miss Quiney's talk everything even to sitting upright at table was mixed up with God and an all-seeing Eye; and his father with a child's deadly penetration Dicky felt sure of it was careless about God. This, by the way, had often puzzled and even frightened him.
"The more reason she should drink his health." Again Mr. Silk was fugleman. His voice braved it off on the silence. Ruth was raising her glass. Her eyes sought Miss Quiney's; but Miss Quiney's, lifted heavenward, had encountered the ceiling upon which Mr.
Miss Quiney's arms did not suddenly go out to Ruth. Ruth noted it. She was just: she understood. In the end Miss Quiney stretched forth her arms; but at first she seemed to shrivel and grow very small in her chair. Nor can her first comment be called adequate, "Dear sir oh, but excuse me! this is so sudden!"
"Then I wish I hadn't, if you're going to grow up and treat me like this. Oh, very well," he added stoutly after a pause, "then I'm learning too, learning to be a sailor; and it'll be first-rate practice to climb aloft to you, over the verandah. You don't mind my spitting on my hands? It's a way they have in the Navy." "Dicky, don't be foolish! Think of Miss Quiney's roses."
Running his gaze along the table, he sighted the Collector and broke into a view-halloo. "Oliver! Brother Noll!" Captain Harry made a second run of it, caught his foot on the prostrate toper whom Langton had dragged out of Miss Quiney's way, and fell on his brother's neck.
It was a relief then after being forced at one time or another to put aside or pigeon-hole a hundred questions on which Miss Quiney's teaching and his father's practice appeared at variance to find a point upon which the certainty of both converged. Heaven and hell might be this or that; but in this world the poor deserved their place, and must be kept to it.
In practice he left it entirely to her, and Miss Quiney's taste in teachers was of the austerest. The answer is that youth, when youth craves for it, will draw knowledge even from the empty air and drink it through the very pores of the skin. Mr.
Cordery, also in the backyard, calling the poultry for their meal of Indian corn; the opening and shutting of windows as rooms were redded and dusted; lastly, Miss Quiney's tentative touch on the spinet.
Hichens might be dry inhumanly dry and his methods repellent; but there were the books, after all, and the books held food for her hunger, wine for her thirst. So too the harpsichord held music, though Miss Quiney's touch upon it was formal and lifeless. . . . In these eighteen months Ruth Josselin had been learning eagerly, teaching herself in a hundred ways and by devices of which she wist not.
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