as worldly. Frivolity, of which there was little in this sober boy,
was in her eyes a vice; loud laughter almost a crime; cards, and
novelles, as she called them, were such in her estimation, as to be
beyond my powers of characterization. Her commonest injunction was,
'Noo be douce,'--that is sober--uttered to the soberest boy she
could ever have known. But Robert was a large-hearted boy, else
this life would never have had to be written; and so, through all
this, his deepest nature came into unconscious contact with that of
his noble old grandmother. There was nothing small about either of
them. Hence Robert was not afraid of her. He had got more of her
nature in him than of her son's. She and his own mother had more
share in him than his father, though from him he inherited good
qualities likewise.

He had concealed his doings with Shargar simply because he believed
they could not be done if his grandmother knew of his plans. Herein
he did her less than justice. But so unpleasant was concealment to
his nature, and so much did the dread of discovery press upon him,
that the moment he saw the thing had come out into the daylight of
her knowledge, such a reaction of relief took place as, operating
along with his deep natural humour and the comical circumstance of
the case, gave him an ease and freedom of communication which he had
never before enjoyed with her. Likewise there was a certain courage
in the boy which, if his own natural disposition had not been so
quiet that he felt the negations of her rule the less, might have
resulted in underhand doings of a very different kind, possibly,
from those of benevolence.

He must have been a strange being to look at, I always think, at
this point of his development, with his huge nose, his black eyes,