Читать книгу The Primrose Path: A Chapter in the Annals of the Kingdom of Fife онлайн

37 страница из 131

“But I am obliged to say yes or no, and I can’t say yes. I hope you will not blame me, Miss Margaret; that would make me very unhappy. I have often thought you were one that would be sure to understand what my position was.”

Margaret did not ask herself why it was that she was expected to understand; but she was vaguely flattered that he should think her approbation so important.

“Me! what do I know?” she said. “I have not been at the college, like you. I have never learned anything;” and, for almost the first time, it occurred to Margaret that there might be some reason in the animadversions and lamentations over her ignorance, of her sisters Grace and Jean.

“You know things without learning.”

“Oh!—but you are making a fool of me, like papa,” cried Margaret. “And what are you doing now, if you are not a minister? You have never been back again till now at the Farm?”

“I am doing just nothing, that is the worst of it. I cannot dig, and to beg I am ashamed.”

“Beg!” She looked at him with a merry laugh. He was what Bell would have called “very well put on.” Margaret saw, by instinct, though she was without any experience, that Rob Glen could not have been a gentleman; but yet he was well dressed, and very superior to everybody else about the Kirkton. “I suppose you have come home on a visit, and to rest.”