The master with his eyes closed hardly
recognized his pupil. Whether or not she understood what she read he
hesitated to inquire; no doubt, as with her other studies, she knew
what attracted her. Rupert Filgee, a sympathetic if not always a correct
reader, who boldly took four and five syllabled fences flying only to
come to grief perhaps in the ditch of some rhetorical pause beyond,
alone expressed his scorn of her performance. Octavia Dean, torn between
her hopeless affection for this beautiful but inaccessible boy, and
her soul-friendship for this bigger but many-frocked girl, studied the
master's face with watchful anxiety.
It is needless to say that Hiram McKinstry was, in the intervals of
stake-driving and stock-hunting, heavily contented with this latest
evidence of his daughter's progress. He even intimated to the master
that her reading being an accomplishment that could be exercised at home
was conducive to that "kam" in which he was so deficient. It was also
rumored that Cressy's oral rendering of Addison's "Reflections in
Westminster Abbey" and Burke's "Indictment of Warren Hastings," had
beguiled him one evening from improving an opportunity to "plug" one of
Harrison's boundary "raiders.
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