he little
Bruces, and, if ever her turn should come to be punished, as no doubt
it would, whether she deserved it or not, to try to take the whipping
as she had seen Alec Forbes take it. Poor Annie! If it should come to
that--nervous organizations are so different!

At five, the school was dismissed for the day, not without another
extempore prayer. A succession of jubilant shouts arose as the boys
rushed out into the lane. Every day to them was a cycle of strife,
suffering, and deliverance. Birth and death, with the life-struggle
between, were shadowed out in it--with this difference, that the God of
a corrupt Calvinism, in the person of Murdoch Malison, ruled that
world, and not the God revealed in the man Christ Jesus. And most of
them having felt the day more or less a burden, were now going home to
heaven for the night.

Annie, having no home, was amongst the few exceptions. Dispirited and
hopeless--a terrible condition for a child--she wondered how Alec
Forbes could be so merry. But he had had his evil things, and they were
over; while hers were all about her still. She had but one comfort
left--that no one would prevent her from creeping up to her own
desolate garret, which was now the dreary substitute for Brownie's
stall. Thither the persecuting boys were not likely to follow her. And
if the rats were in that garret, so was the cat; or at least the cat
knew the way to it. There she might think in peace about some things
about which she had never before seemed to have occasion to think.

CHAPTER X.

Thus at home, if home it could be called, and at school, Annie's days
passed--as most days pass--with family resemblance and individual
difference wondrously mingled. She became interested in what she had to
learn, if not from the manner in which it was presented to her
comprehension, yet from the fact that she had to learn it. Happily or
unhappily, too, she began to get used to the sight of the penal
suffering of her schoolfellows. Nor had anything of the kind as yet
visited her; for it would have been hard for even a more savage master
than Mr Malison to find occasion, now that the first disabling
influences had passed away, to punish the nervous, delicate, anxious
little orphan, who was so diligent, and as quiet as a mouse that fears
to awake a sleeping cat. She had a scared look too, that might have
moved the heart of Malison even, if he had ever paid the least
attention to the looks of children.