"Well, it is beautiful, isn't it, Father?" she said. "Even I felt that it would be easy to learn in that big old room with a roof like that of a church."
An idea struck him.
"Would you like to go to school there, Isobel?"
"I think so, Father, as I must go to school somewhere and I hate those horrible governesses."
"Well," he replied, "you couldn't throw inkpots at the holy Knight, as you did at Miss Hook. Lord! what a rage she was in," he added with a chuckle. "I had to pay her £5 for a new dress. But it was better to do that than to risk a County Court action."
Then the carriage came and he departed.
The upshot of it all was that Isobel became another of Mr. Knight's pupils. When Mr. Blake suggested the arrangement to his wife, she raised certain objections, among them that associating with these little lads might make a tomboy of the girl, adding that she had been taught with children of her own sex. He retorted in his rough marital fashion, that if it made something different of Isobel to what she, the mother, was, he would be glad. Indeed, as usual, Lady Jane's opposition settled the matter.
Now for the next few years of Isobel's life there is little to be told. Mr. Knight was an able man and a good teacher, and being a clever girl she learned a great deal from him, especially in the way of mathematics, for which, as has been said, she had a natural leaning.
Indeed very soon she outstripped Godfrey and the other lads in this and sundry other branches of study, sitting at a table by herself on what once had been the dais of the old hall. In the intervals of lessons, however, it was their custom to take walks together and then it was that she always found herself at the side of Godfrey. Indeed they became inseparable, at any rate in mind. A strange and most uncommon intimacy existed between these young creatures, almost might it have been called a friendship of the spirit. Yet, and this was the curious part of it, they were dissimilar in almost everything that goes to make up a human being. Even in childhood there was scarcely a subject on which they thought alike, scarcely a point upon which they would not argue.
Godfrey was fond of poetry; it bored Isobel. His tendencies were towards religion though of a very different type from that preached and practised by his father; hers were anti-religious. In fact she would have been inclined to endorse the saying of that other schoolgirl who defined faith as "the art of believing those things which we know to be untrue," while to him on the other hand they were profoundly true, though often enough not in the way that they are generally accepted. Had he possessed any powers of definition at that age, probably he would have described our accepted beliefs as shadows of the Truth, distorted and fantastically shaped, like those thrown by changeful, ragged clouds behind which the eternal sun is shining, shadows that vary in length and character according to the hour and weather of the mortal day.