CHAPTER VII.

ROBERT TO THE RESCUE!

That Shargar was a parish scholar--which means that the parish paid
his fees, although, indeed, they were hardly worth paying--made very
little difference to his position amongst his school-fellows. Nor
did the fact of his being ragged and dirty affect his social
reception to his discomfort. But the accumulated facts of the
oddity of his personal appearance, his supposed imbecility, and the
bad character borne by his mother, placed him in a very unenviable
relation to the tyrannical and vulgar-minded amongst them.
Concerning his person, he was long, and, as his name implied, lean,
with pale-red hair, reddish eyes, no visible eyebrows or eyelashes,
and very pale face--in fact, he was half-way to an Albino. His arms
and legs seemed of equal length, both exceedingly long. The
handsomeness of his mother appeared only in his nose and mouth,
which were regular and good, though expressionless; and the birth of
his father only in his small delicate hands and feet, of which any
girl who cared only for smallness, and heeded neither character nor
strength, might have been proud. His feet, however, were supposed
to be enormous, from the difficulty with which he dragged after him
the huge shoes in which in winter they were generally encased.

The imbecility, like the large feet, was only imputed. He certainly
was not brilliant, but neither did he make a fool of himself in any
of the few branches of learning of which the parish-scholar came in
for a share. That which gained him the imputation was the fact that