'It began with the coins,' she said vaguely. 'He said we would study history with them.'
'How did you manage it? or how did he? He has original ways of doing things.'
'Yes, ma'am. We used to take only one or two of the coins at once, and then Pitt told me what to read.'
'A great many different books, at different times.'
'But tell Mrs. Dallas what books, Esther,' her father put in.
'There were so many, papa. Gibbon's History, and Plutarch's Lives, and Rollin, and Vertot and Hume, and I--forget some of them.'
'How much of all these did you really read, Esther?'
'I don't know, ma'am. I read what he told me.'
The lady turned to Colonel Gainsborough with a peculiar smile. 'Sounds rather heterogeneous!' she said.
It was on Esther's lips to justify her teacher, and say how far from heterogeneous, how connected, and how thorough, and how methodical, the reading and the study had been; and how enriched with talk and explanations and descriptions and discussions. How delightful those conversations were, both to herself and Pitt; how living the truth had been made; how had names and facts taken on them the shape and colouring of nature and reality. It rushed back upon Esther, and her lips opened; and then, an inexplicable feeling of something like caution came down upon her, and she shut her lips again.
'It was harmless amusement,' remarked the colonel carelessly.
Whether the mother thought that, may be questioned. She looked again at the child standing before her; a child truly, with childlike innocence and ignorance in her large eyes and pure lips. But the eyes were eyes of beauty; and the lips would soon and readily take to themselves the sweetness and the consciousness of womanhood, and a new bloom would come upon the cheek. The colonel had never yet looked forward to all that; but the wise eyes of the matron saw it as well as if already before her. This little girl might well by and by be dangerous. If Mrs. Dallas had come as a friend, she went away, in a sort, as an enemy, in so far, at least, as Esther's further and future relations with her son were concerned.
The colonel went back to his sofa. Esther sat down again by the coins. She was not quite old enough to reflect much upon the developments of human nature as they came before her; but she was conscious of a disagreeable, troubled sensation left by this visit of Mrs. Dallas. It had not been pleasant. It ought to have been pleasant: she was Pitt's mother; she came on a kind errand; but Esther felt at once repelled and put at a distance.