"Oh, it is a fashion of speech we French have. I shall never be cured of
it, I fear. This wild blood--what will come of it?" And she seemed--as Jack
writes long after, being more observing than I--as if she were looking away
into the distance of time, thinking of what might come to pass. She had,
indeed, strange insight, and even then, as I knew later, had her fears and
unspoken anxieties. And so, with a plentiful supper, ended a matter which
was, I may say, a critical point in my life.




IV


After this my days went by more peacefully. The help and example of Jack
assisted me greatly in my lessons, which I did little relish. I was more
fond of reading, and devoured many books as I sat under our orchard trees
in the spring, or nestled up to the fire on the long winter evenings,
coiled on the settle, that its high back might keep off drafts. My aunt
lent me an abundance of books after that famous "Travels" of Mr. Gulliver.
Now and then my father looked at what she gave me, but he soon tired of
this, and fell asleep in the great oak chair which Governor Penn gave my
grandfather.

Many volumes, and some queer ones, I fell upon in my aunt's house, but,
save once, against the naughtiness of Mrs. Aphra Behn, she never
interfered. We liked greatly a book called "Peter Wilkins," by one Paltock,
full of a queer folk, who had winged "graundees," a sort of crimson robe
made of folds of their own skin. None read it now. My dear Jack fancied it