walk after his lesson with Miss St. John was
over: there was no one at Rothieden to whom his heart and intellect
both were sufficiently drawn to make a close friendship possible. He had
companions, however: Ericson had left his papers with him. The influence
of these led him into yet closer sympathy with Nature and all her moods;
a sympathy which, even in the stony heart of London, he not only did
not lose but never ceased to feel. Even there a breath of wind would not
only breathe upon him, it would breathe into him; and a sunset seen from
the Strand was lovely as if it had hung over rainbow seas. On his
way home he would often go into one of the shops where the neighbours
congregated in the evenings, and hold a little talk; and although, with
Miss St. John filling his heart, his friend's poems his imagination, and
geometry and algebra his intellect, great was the contrast between his
own inner mood and the words by which he kept up human relations with
his townsfolk, yet in after years he counted it one of the greatest
blessings of a lowly birth and education that he knew hearts and
feelings which to understand one must have been young amongst them. He
would not have had a chance of knowing such as these if he had been the
son of Dr. Anderson and born in Aberdeen.

CHAPTER XIX. ROBERT MEDIATES.

One lovely evening in the first of the summer Miss St. John had
dismissed him earlier than usual, and he had wandered out for a walk.
After a round of a couple of miles, he returned by a fir-wood, through
which went a pathway. He had heard Mary St. John say that she was going
to see the wife of a labourer who lived at the end of this path. In the
heart of the trees it was growing very dusky; but when he came to a spot
where they stood away from each other a little space, and the blue sky
looked in from above with one cloud floating in it from which the rose
of the sunset was fading, he seated himself on a little mound of moss
that had gathered over an ancient stump by the footpath, and drew out
his friend's papers. Absorbed in his reading, he was not aware of an
approach till the rustle of silk startled him. He lifted up his eyes,
and saw Miss St. John a few yards from him on the pathway. He rose.

'It's almost too dark to read now, isn't it, Robert?' she said.

'Ah!' said. Robert, 'I know this writing so well that I could read it by
moonlight. I wish I might read some of it to you. You would like it.'

'May I ask w