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

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“’Twill just spoil it,” she said. “The like of you never knows where to stop: either you do nothing at all, or you do a hantle o’er much.”

But on this point Rob took his own way. Certainly, even when you despise the opinion of those around, it is good to be thought well off. The moral atmosphere was lighter round him, and there was the pleasant prospect of meeting Margaret in the evening, and receiving the delightful incense of her admiration; a more agreeable way of filling up this interval of leisure could not have been devised, had his leisure been the most legitimate, the most natural in the world.

While he sat at his drawing in the breezy afternoon, a further sign of the rehabilitation he had undergone was accorded to him. Voices approaching him through the garden, which lay between the house and the west green, prepared him for visitors, and these voices were too familiar to leave him in doubt who the visitors were. It was the Minister, whom Mrs. Glen was leading to the spot where her son was at work on his drawing. “I’ll no say that I expected much,” said Mrs. Glen, “for I’m not one that thinks everything fine that’s done by my ain. I think I’m a’ the mair hard to please; but, Doctor, when I saw upon the paper the very Kirkton itsel’! Losh me! there wasn’t a house but you would have kent it. Robert Jamieson’s and Hugh Macfarlane’s, just as like as if you had been standing afore them. It clean beats me how a lad can do that, that has had little time for anything but his studies; for, Doctor, I never heard but that my Rob was a good student. He hasna come to a good issue, which is awfu’ mysterious; but a good student he aye was, and there’s no a man that kens who will say me nay.”