The monastery; The abbot.

THE MONASTERY. 91
sword to make his title good; and I will call none man, but he that can
bear himself manlike and masterful,"
"For Heaven's sake, peace, brother i" said Edward; "if such words were
taken up and reported out of the house, they would be our mother's ruin."
" Report them yourself, then, and they will be your making, and nobody's
marring save mine own. Say that Halbert Glendinning will never be vassal
to an old man with a cowl and shaven crown, while there are twenty barons
who wear casque and plume that lack bold followers. Let them grant you
these wretched acres, and much meal may they bear you to make your brachan." lie left the room hastily, but instantly returned, and continued to
speak with the same tone of quick and irritated feeling. "And you need
not think so much, neither of you, and especially you, Edward, need not
think so much of your parchment book there, and your cunning in reading
it. By my faith, I will soon learn to read as well as you; and-for I know
a better teacher than your grim old monk, and a better book than his
printed breviary; and since you like scholarcraft so well, Mary Avenel, you
shall see whether Edward or I have most of it." IIe left the apartment,
and came not again.
" What can be the matter with him?" said Mary, following Halbert with
her eyes from the window, as with hasty and unequal steps he ran up the
wild glen -" Where can your brother be going, Edward? - what book?what teacher does he talk of?"
"It avails not guessing," said Edward. " Halbert is angry, he knows
not why, and speaks of he knows not what; let us go again to our lessons,
and he will come home when he has tired himself with scrambling among
the crags as usual."
But Mary's anxiety on account of Halbert seemed more deeply rooted.
She declined prosecuting the task in which they had been so pleasingly
engaged, under the excuse of a headach; nor could Edward prevail upon
her to resume it again that morning.
Meanwhile Halbert, his head unbonneted, his features swelled with jealous
anger, and the tear still in his eye, sped up the wild and upper extremity
of the little valley of Glendearg with the speed of a roebuck, choosing, as
if in desperate defiance of the difficulties of the way, the wildest and most
dangerous paths, and voluntarily exposing himself a hundred times to
dangers which he might have escaped by turning a little aside from them.
It seemed as if he wished his course to be as straight as that of the arrow
to its mark.
He arrived at length in a narrow and secluded cleuc/h, or deep ravine,
which ran down into the valley, and contributed a scanty rivulet to the
supply of the brook with which Glendearg is watered.' Up this he sped
with the same precipitate haste which had marked his departure from the
tower, nor did he pause and look around until he had reached the fountain
from which the rivulet had its rise.
IHere Halbert stopt short, and cast a gloomy, and almost a frightened
glance around him. A huge rock rose in front, from a cleft of which grew
a wild holly-tree, whose dark green branches rustled over the spring which
arose beneath. The banks on either hand rose so high, and approached
each other so closely, that it was only when the sun was at its meridian
height, and during the summer solstice, that its rays could reach the bottom
of the chasm in which he stood. But it was now summer, and the hour
was noon, so that the unwonted reflection of the sun was dancing in the
pellucid fountain.
"It is the season and the hour," said Halbert to himself; "and now
I - I might soon become wiser than Edward with all his pains 1 Mary
should see whether he alone is fit to be consulted, and to sit by her side,
and hang over her as she reads, and point out every word and every letter,
And she loves me better than him - I am sure she does -for she comes of