Jamie ceased the clocklike motion of his body to and fro over the difficult lesson.  “I never understood just what were the Erinnys, sir?”

“The Erinnys?” Strickland laid down the pen and turned in his chair.  “I’ll have to think a moment, to get it straight for you, Jamie....  The Erinnys are the Fates as avengers.  They are the vengeance-demanding part of ourselves objectified, supernaturalized, and named.  Of old, where injury was done, the Erinnys were at hand to pull the roof down upon the head of the injurer.  Their office was to provide unerringly sword for sword, bitter cup for bitter cup.  They never forgot, they always avenged, though sometimes they took years to do it.  They esteemed themselves, and were esteemed, essential to the moral order.  They are the dark and bitter extreme of justice, given power by the imagination....  Do you think that you know the chapter now?”

Jamie achieved his recitation, and then was set to mathematics.  The tutor’s quill drove on across the page.  He looked up.

“Mr. Touris has come to Black Hill?”

Jamie and Alice worshiped interruptions.

“He has twenty carriers bringing fine things all the time—­”

“Mother is going to take me when she goes to see Mrs. Alison, his sister—­”

“He is going to spend money and make friends—­”

“Mother says Mrs. Alison was most bonny when she was young, but England may have spoiled her—­”

“The minister told the laird that Mr. Touris put fifty pounds in the plate—­”

Strickland held up his hand, and the scholars, sighing, returned to work. Buzz, buzz! went the bees outside the window.  The sun climbed high.  Alexander shut his geometry and came through the break in the wall and across the span of green to the school-room.

“That’s done, Mr. Strickland.”

Strickland looked at the paper that his eldest pupil put before him.  “Yes, that is correct.  Do you want, this morning, to take up the reading?”

“I had as well, I suppose.”

“If you go to Edinburgh—­if you do as your father wishes and apply yourself to the law—­you will need to read well and to speak well.  You do not do badly, but not well enough.  So, let’s begin!” He put out his hand and drew from the bookshelf a volume bearing the title, The Treasury of Orators.  “Try what you please.”

Alexander took the book and moved to the unoccupied window.  Here he half sat, half stood, the morning light flowing in upon him.  He opened the volume and read, with a questioning inflection, the title beneath his eyes, “’The Cranes of Ibycus’?”

“Yes,” assented Strickland.  “That is a short, graphic thing.”

Alexander read: