But always there came a black day when a desire to read the novel seized her, and she hurried home with it beneath her rokelay.

This year the dashing banker's choice was a lady's novel called "I Love My Love with an A," and it was a frivolous tale, those being before the days of the new fiction, with its grand discovery that women have an equal right with men to grow beards.

The hero had such a way with him and was so young (Miss Ailie could not stand them a day more than twenty) that the school-mistress was enraptured and scared at every page, but she fondly hoped that Tommy did not understand.
However, he discovered one day what something printed thus, "D--n," meant, and he immediately said the word with such unction that Miss Ailie let fall her knitting.

She would have ended the readings then had not Agatha been at that point in the arms of an officer who, Miss Ailie felt almost certain, had a wife in India, and so how could she rest till she knew for certain?
To track the officer by herself was not to be thought of, to read without knitting being such shameless waste of time, and it was decided to resume the readings on a revised plan: Tommy to say "stroke" in place of the "D--ns," and "word we have no concern with" instead of "Darling" and "Little One." Miss Ailie was not the only person at the Dovecot who admired Tommy.
Though in duty bound, as young patriots, to jeer at him for having been born in the wrong place, the pupils of his own age could not resist the charm of his reminiscences; even Gav Dishart, a son of the manse, listened attentively to him.

His great topic was his birthplace, and whatever happened in Thrums, he instantly made contemptible by citing something of the same kind, but on a larger scale, that had happened in London; he turned up his nose almost farther than was safe when they said Catlaw was a stiff mountain to climb.