That attic was very quiet for the next quarter of an hour, for Laura, still in her bridal veil, was down on her knees on the bare boards, as happy and busy as a young foal in a field of green corn.

There were volumes of old sermons which she passed over quickly; a natural history of the world which might have detained her had there not been so many other vistas to explore; histories and grammars and lexicons and “keepsakes” with coloured pictures of beautiful languishing ladies bending over graves beneath weeping willows, or standing before mirrors dressed for balls, with the caption “Will he come to-night?” There were old novels, too, and poetry. The difficulty was to know what to look at first.

When they missed her downstairs and came to call her to dinner she was deep in Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, and it was afterwards a standing joke against her that she had jumped and looked dazed when Amy hissed into her ear, “Do you like apple dumplings?”

“Laura’s a bookworm, a bookworm, a bookworm!” she sang to her sisters with the air of having made an astonishing discovery, and Laura wondered if a bookworm might not be something unpleasant, until she added: “A bookworm, like Father.”

She had brought the first volume of Pamela down with them to illustrate Laura’s bookworminess and now asked her mother if Laura might not have it to keep. After glancing through it, her mother looked doubtful, for she gathered that it was a love story, though not, perhaps, the full extent of its unsuitability for a reader of such tender age. But Uncle Tom, coming in just then to his dinner and hearing the whole story, said: “Let her keep it. No book’s too old for anybody who is able to enjoy it, and none too young, either, for that matter. Let her read what she likes, and when she’s tired of reading to herself she can come to my shop and read to me while I work.”

“Poor Laura! You’re in for it!” laughed mischievous Nell. “Once you start reading to Dad, he’ll never let you go. You’ll have to sit in his smelly old shop and read his dry old books for ever.”

“Now! Now! The less you say about that the better, my girl. Who was it came to read to me and made such a hash of it that I never asked her to come again?”