“I would indeed.  But won’t Miss Main object to us interrupting—­”

Miss Main at once reassured her on that point, and said that both she and the scholars loved visitors.  She took them into the large schoolroom where twenty small people of various sizes sat with their books, very cheerfully imbibing knowledge.

Mhor and another small boy occupied one desk.

Jean greeted the small boy as “Sandy,” and asked him what he was studying at that moment.

“I don’t know,” said Sandy.

“Sandy,” said Miss Main, “don’t disgrace your teachers.  You know you are learning the multiplication table.  What are three times three?”

Sandy merely looked coy.

“Mhor?”

“Six,” said Mhor, after some thought.

“Hopeless,” said Miss Main.  “Come and speak to my sister Elspeth, Miss Reston.”

“My sister Elspeth” was a tall, fair girl with merry blue eyes.

“Do you teach the Mhor?” Pamela asked her.

“I have that honour,” said Miss Elspeth, and began to laugh.  “He always arrives full of ideas.  This morning he had thought out a plan to stop the rain.  The sky, he said, must be gone over with glue, but he gave it up when he remembered how sticky it would be for the angels....  He has the most wonderful feeling for words of any child I ever taught.  He can’t, for instance, bear to hear a Bible story told in everyday language.  The other children like it broken down to them, but Mhor pleads for ‘the real words.’  He likes the swing and majesty of them....  I was reading them Kipling’s story, Servants of the Queen, the other day.  You know where it makes the oxen speak of the walls of the city falling, ‘and the dust went up as though many cattle were coming home.’  I happened to look up, and there was Mhor with lamps lit in those wonderful green eyes of his, gazing at me.  He said, ’I like that bit.  It’s a nice bit.  I think it should be at the end of a sad story.’  And he uses words well himself, have you noticed?  The other day he came and thrust a dead field-mouse into my hand.  I squealed and dropped it, and he said, ‘Afraid?  And of such a calm little gentleman?’”

Pamela asked if Mhor’s behaviour was good.

“Only fair,” said pretty Miss Elspeth.  “He always means to be good, but he is inhabited by an imp of mischief that prompts him to do the most improbable things.  He certainly doesn’t make for peace in the school, but he keeps ‘a body frae languor.’  I like a naughty boy myself much better than a good one.  He’s the ‘more natural beast of the twain.’”

Outside, with the freed Mhor capering before them, Pamela was enthusiastic over the little school and its mistresses.

“Miss Main looks like an old miniature, with her white hair and her delicate colouring, and is wise and kind and sensible as well; and as for that daffodil girl, Elspeth, she is a sheer delight.”