The imprisonment was sometimes commuted for chastisement--or finished off with it, when it did not suit the convenience of the master to enforce the full term of a school-day.
Upon certain Saturdays, moreover, one in each month, I think, a repetition was required of all the questions and proofs that had been, or ought to have been, learned since the last observance of the same sort.
Now the day in question was one of these of accumulated labour, and Alec Forbes only succeeded in bringing proof of his inability for the task, and was in consequence condemned "to be keepit in"-- a trial hard enough for one whose chief delights were the open air and the active exertion of every bodily power.
Annie caught sight of his mortified countenance, the expression of which, though she had not heard his doom, so filled her with concern and indignation, that--her eyes and thoughts fixed upon him, at the other end of the class--she did not know when her turn came, but allowed the master to stand before her in bootless expectation.

He did not interrupt her, but with a refinement of cruelty that ought to have done him credit in his own eyes, waited till the universal silence had at length aroused Annie to self-consciousness and a sense of annihilating confusion.

Then, with a smile on his thin lips, but a lowering thunder-cloud on his brow, he repeated the question: "What doth every sin deserve ?" Annie, bewildered, and burning with shame at finding herself the core of the silence--feeling is if her poor little spirit stood there naked to the scoffs and jeers around--could not recall a word of the answer given in the Catechism.

So, in her bewilderment, she fell back on her common sense and experience, which, she ought to have known, had nothing to do with the matter in hand.
"What doth every sin deserve ?" again repeated the tyrant.
"A lickin'," whimpered Annie, and burst into tears.
The master seemed much inclined to consider her condemned out of her own mouth, and give her a whipping at once; for it argued more than ignorance to answer _a whipping_, instead of _the wrath and curse of God_, &c., &c., as plainly set down in the Scotch Targum.

But reflecting, perhaps, that she was a girl, and a little one, and that although it would be more gratification to him to whip her, it might be equal suffering to her to be _kept in_, he gave that side wave of his head which sealed the culprit's doom, and Annie took her place among the condemned, with a flutter of joy at her heart that Alec Forbes would not be left without a servant to wait upon him.