But this anticipates;
only I shall have less occasion to speak of Miss St. John by the time
she has come into this purer air of the uphill road.

Robert was happier than he ever could have expected to be in his
grandmother's house. She treated him like an honoured guest, let him do
as he would, and go where he pleased. Betty kept the gable-room in the
best of order for him, and, pattern of housemaids, dusted his table
without disturbing his papers. For he began to have papers; nor were
they occupied only with the mathematics to which he was now giving his
chief attention, preparing, with the occasional help of Mr. Innes, for
his second session.

He had fits of wandering, though; visited all the old places; spent a
week or two more than once at Bodyfauld; rode Mr. Lammie's half-broke
filly; revelled in the glories of the summer once more; went out to tea
occasionally, or supped with the school-master; and, except going to
church on Sunday, which was a weariness to every inch of flesh upon his
bones, enjoyed everything.

CHAPTER XVIII. A GRAVE OPENED.

One thing that troubled Robert on this his return home, was the
discovery that the surroundings of his childhood had deserted him. There
they were, as of yore, but they seemed to have nothing to say to him--no
remembrance of him. It was not that everything looked small and
narrow; it was not that the streets he saw from his new quarters, the
gable-room, were awfully still after the roar of Aberdeen, and a passing
cart seemed to shudder at the loneliness of the noise itself made; it
was that everything seemed to be conscious only of the past and care
nothing for him now. The very chairs with their inlaid backs had an
embalmed look, and stood as in a dream. He could pass even the walled-up
door without emotion, for all the feeling that had been gathered about
the knob that admitted him to Mary St. John, had transferred itself to
the brass bell-pull at her street-door.

But one day, after standing for a while at the window, looking down
on the street where he had first seen the beloved form of Ericson,
a certain old mood began to revive in him. He had been working at
quadratic equations all the morning; he had been foiled in the attempt
to find the true algebraic statement of a very tough question involving
various ratios; and, vexed with himself, he had risen to look out,
as the only available zeitvertreib. It was one of those rainy days
of spring which it needs a