 many a youth and man to
the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little
finger or the hem of her robe. Bob, with the pack on his back, had as respectful
an adoration for this dark-eyed maiden as if he had been a knight in armour
calling aloud on her name as he pricked on to the fight.
    That gleam of merriment soon died away from Maggie's face, and perhaps only
made the returning gloom deeper by contrast. She was too dispirited even to like
answering questions about Bob's present of books, and she carried them away to
her bedroom, laying them down there and seating herself on her one stool,
without caring to look at them just yet. She leaned her cheek against the
window-frame, and thought that the light-hearted Bob had a lot much happier than
hers.
    Maggie's sense of loneliness, and utter privation of joy, had deepened with
the brightness of advancing spring. All the favourite out-door nooks about home,
which seemed to have done their part with her parents in nurturing and
cherishing her, were now mixed up with the home-sadness, and gathered no smile
from the sunshine. Every affection, every delight the poor child had had, was
like an aching nerve to her. There was no music for her any more - no piano, no
harmonised voices, no delicious stringed instruments, with their passionate
cries of imprisoned spirits sending a strange vibration through her frame. And
of all her school-life there was nothing left her now but her little collection
of school-books, which she turned over with a sickening sense that she knew them
all, and they were all barren of comfort. Even at school she had often wished
for books with more in them: everything she learned there seemed like the ends
of long threads that snapped immediately. And now - without the indirect charm
of school-emulation - Télémaque was mere bran; so were the hard dry questions on
Christian Doctrine: there was no flavour in them - no strength. Sometimes Maggie
thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have
had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems! - then, perhaps, she might have
found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. And yet
.... they were hardly what she wanted. She could make dream-worlds of her own -
but no dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this
hard, real life: the unhappy-looking father,
