CHAPTER XXI
Too slow, far too slow, passed the lengthening days. Kate was bedded by nine to make them shorter by an hour or two, but what she took from the foot of the day she tacked to the head of it, as Paddy in the story eked his blanket, and she was up in the mornings long before Wanton Wully rang the six-hours’ bell. The elder Dyces – saving Ailie, who knew all about it, hearing it from Bud in passionate whispers as they lay together in one bed in the brightening morns of May – might think summer’s coming was what made the household glad, Kate sing like the laverock, and Lennox so happy and so good, but it was the thought of Charles. “Dear me! you’ve surely taken a desperate fancy for Prince Charlie songs,” would Miss Bell remark to Bud and the maid of Colonsay. “Is there not another ditty in the ballant?” and they would glance at each other guiltily but never let on.
“Come o’er the stream, Charlie, dear Charlie, brave Charlie,
Come o’er the stream, Charlie, and I’ll be Maclean.”
– Bud composed that one in a jiffy sitting one day at the kitchen window, and of all the noble Jacobite measures Kate liked it best, “it was so clever, and so desperate like the thing!” Such a daft disease is love! To the woman whose recollection of the mariner was got from olden Sabbath walks ’tween churches in the windy isle, among the mossy tombs, and to Bud, who had never seen him, but had made for herself a portrait blent of the youth so gay and gallant Kate described, and of George Sibley Purser, and of dark ear-ringed men of the sea that in “The Tempest” cry “Heigh, my hearts! cheerily, cheerily, cheerily, my hearts! yare, yare,” the prospect of his presence was a giddy joy.
And after all the rascal came without warning, to be for a day and a night within sound of Kate’s minstrelsy without her knowing it, for he lodged, an ardent but uncertain man, on the other side of the garden-wall, little thinking himself the cause and object of these musical mornings. Bud found him out – that clever one! who was surely come from America to set all the Old World right, – she found him at the launching of the Wave.
Lady Anne’s yacht dozed like a hedgehog under leaves through the winter months below the beeches on what we call the hard – on the bank of the river under Jocka’s house, where the water’s brackish, and the launching of her was always of the nature of a festival, for the Earl’s men were there, John Taggart’s band, with “A life on the Ocean Wave” between each passage of the jar of old Tom Watson’s home-made ale – not tipsy lads but jovial, and even the children of the schools, for it happened on a Saturday.
Bud and Footles went with each other and the rest of the bairns, unknown to their people, for in adventures such as these the child delighted, and was wisely never interdicted.
The man who directed the launch was a stranger in a foreign-looking soft slouch hat – Charles plain to identify in every feature, in the big brown searching eyes that only Gaelic could do justice to, and his walk so steeve and steady, his lovely beard, his tread on the hard as if he owned the land, his voice on the deck as if he were the master of the sea. She stood apart and watched him, fascinated, and could not leave even when the work was done and the band was home-returning, charming the road round the bay with “Peggy Baxter’s Quickstep.” He saw her lingering, smiled on her, and beckoned on her to cross the gangway that led to the yacht from the little jetty.
“Well, wee lady,” said he, with one big hand on her head and another on the dog, “is this the first of my crew at a quay-head jump? Sign on at once and I’ll make a sailor of you.”
“Oh, please,” said she, looking up in his face, too anxious to enter into his humour, “are you our Kate’s Charles?”
“Kate!” said he, reflecting, with a hand in his beard, through which his white teeth shone. “There’s such a wheen of Kates here and there, and all of them fine, fine gyurls! Still-and-on, if yours is like most of her name that I’m acquaint with, I’m the very man for her; and my name, indeed, is what you might be calling Charles. In fact,” – in a burst of confidence, seating himself on a water-breaker, – “my Christian name is Charles – Charlie, for short among the gentry. You are not speaking, by any chance, of one called Kate MacNeill?” he added, showing some red in the tan of his countenance.
“Of course I am,” said Bud reproachfully. “Oh, men! men! As if there could be any other! I hope to goodness you love her same as you said you did, and haven’t been – been carrying-on with any other Kates for a diversion. I’m Lennox Dyce. Your Kate stays with me and Uncle Dan, and Auntie Bell, and Auntie Ailie, and this sweet little dog by the name of Footles. She’s so jolly! My! won’t she be tickled to know you’ve come? And – and how’s the world, Captain Charles?”
“The world?” he said, aback, looking at her curiously as she seated herself beside him on a hatch.
“Yes, the world, you know – the places you were in,” with a wave of the hand that seemed to mean the universe.
“‘Edinburgh, Leith,
Portobello, Musselburgh, and Dalkeith?’
– No, that’s Kate’s favourite geography lesson, ’cause she can sing it. I mean Rotterdam, and Santander, and Bilbao – all the lovely places on the map where a letter takes four days and a twopence-ha’penny stamp, and’s mighty apt to smell of rope.”
“Oh, them!” said he, with the warmth of recollection, “they’re not so bad – in fact, they’re just A1. It’s the like of there you see life and spend the money.”
“Have you been in Italy?” asked Bud. “I’d love to see that old Italy – for the sake of Romeo and Juliet, you know, and my dear, dear Portia.”
“I know,” said Charles. “Allow me! Perfect beauties, all fine, fine gyurls; but I don’t think very much of dagoes. I have slept in their sailors’ homes, and never hear Italy mentioned but I feel I want to scratch myself.”
“Dagoes!” cried Bud; “that’s what Jim called them. Have you been in America?”
“Have I been in America? I should think I have,” said he emphatically, “The Lakes. It’s yonder you get value – two dollars a-day and everywhere respected like a perfect gentleman. Men’s not mice out yonder in America.”
“Then you maybe have been in Chicago?” cried Bud, her face filled with a happy expectation as she pressed the dog in her arms till its fringe mixed with her own wild curls.
“Chicago?” said the Captain. “Allow me! Many a time. You’ll maybe not believe it, but it was there I bought this hat.”
“Oh!” cried Bud, with the tears in her eyes and speechless for a moment, “I – I – could just hug that hat. Won’t you please let me – let me pat it?’
“Pat away,” said Captain Charles, laughing, and took it off with the sweep of a cavalier that was in itself a compliment. “You know yon place – Chicago?” he asked, as she patted his headgear fondly and returned it to him. For a little her mind was far away from the deck of Lady Anne’s yacht, her eyes on the ripple of the tide, her nostrils full, and her little bosom heaving.
“You were there?” he asked again.
“Chicago’s where I lived,” she said. “That was mother’s place,” and into his ear she poured a sudden flood of reminiscence – of her father and mother, and the travelling days and lodging-houses, and Mr and Mrs Molyneux, and the graves in the far-off cemetery. The very thought of them all made her again American in accent and in phrase. He listened, understanding, feeling the vexation of that far-sundering by the sea as only a sailor can, and clapped her on the shoulder, and looking at him she saw that in his eyes which made her love him more than ever.
“Oh my!” she said bravely, “here I’m talking away to you about myself, and I’m no more account than a rabbit under these present circumstances, Captain Charles, and all the time you’re just pining to know all about your Kate.”
The Captain tugged his beard and reddened again. “A fine, fine gyurl!” said he. “I hope – I hope she’s pretty well.”
“She’s fine,” said Bud, nodding her head gravely. “You bet Kate can walk now without taking hold. Why, there’s never anything wrong with her ’cepting now and then the croodles, and they’re not anything lingering.”
“There was a kind of a rumour that she was at times a trifle delicate,” said Charles. “In fact, it was herself who told me, in her letters.”
Bud blushed. This was one of the few details of her correspondence on which she and Kate had differed. It had been her idea that an invalidish hint at intervals produced a nice and tender solicitude in the roving sailor, and she had, at times, credited the maid with some of Mrs Molyneux’s old complaints, a little modified and more romantic, though Kate herself maintained that illness in a woman under eighty was looked upon as anything but natural or interesting in Colonsay.
“It was nothing but – but love,” she said now, confronted with the consequence of her imaginative cunning. “You know what love is, Captain Charles? A powerfully weakening thing, though I don’t think it would hurt anybody if they wouldn’t take it so much to heart.”
“I’m glad to hear it’s only – only what you mention,” said Charles, much relieved. “I thought it might be something inward, and that maybe she was working too hard at her education.”
“Oh, she’s not taking her education so bad as all that,” Bud assured him. “She isn’t wasting to a shadow sitting up nights with a wet towel on her head soaking in the poets and figuring sums. All she wanted was to be sort of middling smart, but nothing gaudy.”
Captain Charles looked sideway keenly at the child as she sat beside him, half afraid himself of the irony he had experienced among her countrymen, but saw it was not here. Indeed it never was in Lennox Dyce, for all her days she had the sweet engaging self-unconsciousness no training can command; frankness, fearlessness, and respect for all her fellows – the gifts that will never fail to make the proper friends. She talked so composedly that he was compelled to frankness himself on a subject no money could have made him speak about to any one a week ago.
“Between you and me and the mast,” said he, “I’m feared Kate has got far too clever for the like of me, and that’s the way I have not called on her.”
“Then you’d best look pretty spry,” said Bud, pointing a monitory finger at him; “for there’s beaux all over the place that’s wearing their Sunday clothes week-days, and washing their faces night and morning, hankering to tag on to her, and she’ll maybe tire of standing out in the cold for you. I wouldn’t be skeered, Cap’, if I was you; she’s not too clever for or’nary use; she’s nicer than ever she was that time you used to walk with her in Colonsay.” Bud was beginning to be alarmed at the misgivings to which her own imaginings had given rise.
“If you saw her letters,” said Charles gloomily. “Poetry and foreign princes. One of them great at the dancing! He kissed her hand. He would never have ventured a thing like that if she hadn’t given him encouragement.”
“Just diversion,” said Bud consolingly. “She was only – she was only putting by the time; and she often says she’ll only marry for her own conveniency, and the man for her is – well, you know, Captain Charles.”
“There was a Russian army officer,” proceeded the seaman, still suffering a jealous doubt.
“But he’s dead. He’s deader ’n canned beans. Mr Wanton gied him – gied him the BAGGONET. There wasn’t really anything in it anyway. Kate didn’t care for him the tiniest bit, and I guess it was a great relief.”
“Then she’s learning the piano,” said the Captain; “that’s not like a working gyurl. And she talked in one of her letters about sitting on Uncle Dan’s knee.”
Bud dropped the dog at her feet and burst into laughter: in that instance she had certainly badly jumbled the identities.
“It’s nothing to laugh at,” said the Captain, tugging his beard. “It’s not at all becoming in a decent gyurl; and it’s not like the Kate I knew in Colonsay.”
Bud saw the time had come for a full confession.
“Captain Charles,” she said, when she recovered herself, “it – it wasn’t Kate said that at all; it was another girl called Winifred Wallace. You see, Kate is always so busy doing useful things —such soup! and – and a washing every Monday, and taking her education, and the pens were all so dev – so – so stupid, that she simply had to get some one to help her write those letters; and that’s why Winifred Wallace gave a hand and messed things up a bit, I guess. Where the letters talked solemn sense about the weather and the bad fishing and bits about Oronsay, and where they told you to be sure and change your stockings when you came downstairs from the mast, out the wet, and where they said you were the very, very one she loved, that was Kate; but when there was a lot of dinky talk about princes and Russian army officers and slabs of poetry, that was just Winifred Wallace putting on lugs and showing off. No, it wasn’t all showing off; it was because she kind of loved you herself. You see she didn’t have any beau of her own, Mr Charles; and – and she thought it wouldn’t be depriving Kate of anything to pretend, for Kate said there was no depravity in it.”
“Who’s Winifred Wallace?” asked the surprised sailor.
“I’m all the Winifred Wallace there is,” said Bud penitently. “It’s my poetry name, – it’s my other me. I can do a heap of things when I’m Winifred I can’t do when I’m plain Bud, or else I’d laugh at myself enough to hurt, I’m so mad. Are you angry, Mr Charles?”
“Och! just Charles to you,” said the sailor. “Never heed the honours. I’m not angry a bit. Allow me! In fact, I’m glad to find the prince and the piano and the poetry were all nonsense.”
“I thought that poetry pretty middling myself,” admitted Bud, but in a hesitating way that made him look very guilty.
“The poetry,” said he quickly, “was splendid. There was nothing wrong with it that I could see; but I’m glad it wasn’t Kate’s – for she’s a fine, fine gyurl, and brought up most respectable.”
“Yes,” said Bud; “she’s better ’n any poetry. You must feel gay because you are going to marry her.”
“I’m not so sure of her marrying me. She maybe wouldn’t have me.”
“But she can’t help it!” cried Bud. “She’s bound to, for the witch-lady fixed it on Hallowe’en. Only, I hope you won’t marry her for years and years. Why, Auntie Bell ’d go crazy if you took away our Kate; for good girls ain’t so easy to get nowadays as they used to be when they had three pound ten in the half-year, and nailed their trunks down to the floor of a new place when they got it, for fear they might be bounced. I’d be vexed I helped do anything if you married her for a long while. Besides, you’d be sorry yourself, for her education is not quite done; she’s only up to Compound Multiplication and the Tudor Kings. You’d just be sick sorry.”
“Would I?”
“Course you would! That’s love. Before one marries it’s hunkydory – it’s fairy all the time; but after that it’s the same old face at breakfast, Mr Cleland says, and simply putting up with one another. Oh, love’s a wonderful thing, Charles; it’s the Great Thing, but sometimes I say ‘Give me Uncle Dan!’ Promise you’ll not go marrying Kate right off.”
The sailor roared with laughter. “Lord!” said he, “if I wait too long I’ll be wanting to marry yourself, for you’re a dangerous gyurl.”
“But I’m never going to marry,” said Bud. “I want to go right on loving everybody, and don’t yearn for any particular man tagging on to me.”
“I never heard so much about love in English all my life,” said Charles, “though it’s common enough and quite respectable in Gaelic. Do you – do you love myself?”
“Course I do!” said Bud, cuddling Footles.
“Then,” said he firmly, “the sooner I sign on with Kate the better, for you’re a dangerous gyurl.”
So they went down the road together, planning ways of early foregatherings with Kate, and you may be sure Bud’s way was cunningest.
CHAPTER XXII
When Kate that afternoon was told her hour was come, and that to-morrow she must meet her destined mariner, she fell into a chair, threw her apron over her head, and cried and laughed horribly turn about – the victim of hysteria that was half from fear and half from a bliss too deep and unexpected.
“Mercy on me!” she exclaimed. “Now he’ll find out everything, and what a stupid one I am. All my education’s clean gone out of my head; I’m sure I couldn’t spell an article. I canna even mind the ninth commandment, let alone the Reasons Annexed; and as for grammar, whether it’s ‘Give the book to Bud and me’ or ‘Give the book to Bud and I,’ is more than I could tell you if my very life depended on it. Oh, Lennox! now we’re going to catch it! Are you certain sure he said to-morrow?”
Bud gazed at her disdainfully and stamped her foot. “Stop that, Kate MacNeill!” she commanded. “You mustn’t act so silly. He’s as skeered of you as you can be of him. He’d have been here Friday before the morning milk if he didn’t think you’d be the sort to back him into a corner and ask him questions about ancient Greece and Rome. Seems to me love makes some folk idiotic; lands sake! I’m mighty glad it always leaves me calm as a plate of pumpkin pie.”
“Is – is – he looking tremendously genteel and well-put-on?” asked the maid of Colonsay, with anxious lines on her forehead. “Is he – is he as nice as I said he was?”
“He was everything you said – except the Gaelic. I knew he couldn’t be so bad as that sounded that you said about his eyes. I – I never saw a more becoming man. If I had known just how noble he looked, I’d have sent him stacks of poetry,” whereat Kate moaned again, rocked herself in her chair most piteously, and swore she could never have the impudence to see him till she had her new frock from the dressmakers.
“He’ll be thinking I’m refined and quite the lady,” she said, “and I’m just the same plain Kate I was in Colonsay, and him a regular Captain! It was all your fault, with your fancy letters. Oh, Lennox Dyce, I think I hate you, just: lend me your hanky, – mine’s all wet with greeting.”
“If you weren’t so big and temper wasn’t sinful, I’d shake you!” said Bud, producing her handkerchief. “You were just on your last legs for a sailor, and you’d never have put a hand on one if I didn’t write these letters. And now, when the sweetest sailor in the land is brought to your doorstep, you don’t ’preciate your privileges and have a grateful heart, but turn round and yelp at me. I tell you, Kate MacNeill, sailors are mighty scarce and sassy in a little place like this, and none too easy picked up, and ’stead of sitting there, with a smut on your nose and tide-marks on your eyebrows, mourning, you’d best arise and shine, or somebody with their wits about them ’ll snap him up. I’d do it myself if it wouldn’t be not honourable to you.”
“Oh! if I just had another week or two’s geography!” said Kate dolefully.
Bud had to laugh – she could not help herself; and the more she laughed, the more tragic grew the servant’s face.
“Seems to me,” said Bud, “that I’ve got to run this loving business all along the line: you don’t know the least thing about it after g-o, go. Why, Kate, I’m telling you Charles is afraid of you more than you are of him. He thought you’d be that educated you’d wear specs, and stand quite stiff talking poetry all the time, and I had to tell him every dinky bit in these letters were written by me.”
“Then that’s worse!” cried the servant, more distressed than ever. “For he’ll think I canna write myself, and I can write like fury if you only give me a decent pen, and shut the door, and don’t bother me.”
“No fears!” said Bud; “I made that all right. I said you were too busy housekeeping, and I guess it’s more a housekeeper than a school-ma’rm Charles needs. Anyhow, he’s so much in love with you, he’d marry you if you were only half-way through the Twopenny. He’s plump head over heels, and it’s up to you, as a sensible girl, not to conceal that you like him some yourself.”
“I’ll not know what to say to him,” said Kate, “and he always was so clever: half the time I couldna understand him if it wasn’t for his eyes.”
“Well, he’ll know what to say to you, I guess, if all the signs are right. Charles is not so shy as all that, – love-making is where he lives; and he made goo-goo eyes at myself without an introduction. You’d fancy, to hear you, he was a school inspector, and he’s only just an or’nary lover thinking of the happy days you used to have in Colonsay. If I was you I’d not let on I was anything but what I really was; I’d be natural – yes, that’s what I’d be, for being natural’s the deadliest thing below the canopy to make folk love you. Don’t pretend, but just be the same Kate MacNeill to him you are to me. Just you listen to him, and now and then look at him, and don’t think of a darned thing – I mean, don’t think of a blessed thing but how nice he is, and he’ll be so pleased and so content he’ll not even ask you to spell cat”
“Content!” cried Kate, with conviction. “Not him! Fine I ken him! He’ll want to kiss me, as sure as God’s in heaven, – beg your pardon.”
“I expect that’s not a thing you should say to me,” said Bud, blushing deeply.
“But I begged your pardon,” said the maid.
“I don’t mean that about God in heaven, that’s right – so He is, or where would we be? what I meant was about the kissing. I’m old enough for love, but I’m not old enough for you to be talking to me about kissing. I guess Auntie Ailie wouldn’t like to have you talk to me about a thing like that, and Auntie Bell, she’d be furious – it’s too advanced.”
“What time am I to see him?” asked Kate.
“In the morning. If you go out to the garden just after breakfast, and whistle, he’ll look over the wall.”
“The morning!” cried the maid aghast. “I couldn’t face him in the morning. Who ever heard of such a thing? Now you have gone away and spoiled everything! I could hardly have all my wits about me even if it was only gloaming.”
Bud sighed despairingly. “Oh, you don’t understand, Kate,” said she. “He wanted it to be the evening, too, but I said you weren’t a miserable pair of owls, and the best time for anything is the morning. Uncle Dan says the first half-hour in the morning is worth three hours at any other time of the day, for when you’ve said your prayers, and had a good bath, and a clean shave, and your boots new on – no slippers nor slithery dressing-gowns, the peace of God, and – and – and the assurance of strength and righteousness descends upon you so that you – you – you can tackle wild-cats. I feel so brash and brave myself in the morning I could skip the hills like a goat. It’s simply got to be the morning, Kate MacNeill. That’s when you look your very best, if you care to take a little trouble, and don’t simply just slouch through, and I’m set on having you see him first time over the garden wall. That’s the only way to fix the thing up romantic, seeing we haven’t any balcony. You’ll go out and stand against the blossom of the cherry-tree, and hold a basket of flowers and parsley, and when he peeks over and sees you looming out in the picture, I tell you he’ll be tickled to death. That’s the way Shakespeare ’d fix it, and he knew.”
“I don’t think much of Shakespeare,” said Kate. “Fancy yon Igoa!”
“Iago, you mean; well, what about him?”
“The wickedness of him; such a lot of lies!”
“Pooh!” said Bud. “He was only for the effect. Of course there never really was such a mean wicked man as that Iago, – there couldn’t be; but Shakespeare made him just so’s you’d like the nice folk all the more by thinking what they might have been if God had let Himself go.”
That night Kate was abed by eight. Vainly the town cried for her – the cheerful passage of feet on the pavement, and a tinkler piper at the Cross, and she knew how bright was the street, with the late-lit windows of the shops, and how intoxicating was the atmosphere of Saturday in the dark; but having said her Lord’s Prayer in Gaelic, and “Now I lay me down to sleep” in English, she covered her head with the blankets and thought of the coming day with joy and apprehension, until she fell asleep.
In the morning Miss Bell had no sooner gone up to the making of beds, that was her Sabbath care to save the servant-maid from too much sin, and Ailie to her weekly reading with the invalid Duncan Gill, than Bud flew into the kitchen to make Kate ready for her tryst. Never in this world were breakfast dishes sooner cleaned and dried than by that eager pair: no sooner were they done than Kate had her chest-lid up and had dived, head foremost, among her Sunday finery.
“What’s that?” asked Bud. “You’re not going to put on glad rags, are you?” For out there came a blue gown, fondled tenderly.
“Of course I am,” said Kate. “It’s either that or my print for it, and a print wrapper would not be the thing at all to meet – meet the Captain in; he’ll be expecting me to be truly refined.”
“I think he’d like the wrapper better,” said Bud gravely. “The blue gown’s very nice – but it’s not Kate, somehow: do you know, I think it’s Auntie Ailie up to the waist, and the banker’s cook in the lacey bits above that, and it don’t make you refined a bit. It’s not what you put on that makes you refined, it’s things you can’t take off. You have no idea how sweet you look in that print, Kate, with your cap and apron. You look better in them than if you wore the latest yell of fashion. I’d want to marry you myself if I was a captain, and saw you dressed like that; but if you had on your Sunday gown I’d – I’d bite my lip and go home and ask advice from mother.”
Kate put past the blue gown, not very willingly, but she had learned by now that in some things Bud had better judgment than herself. She washed and dried her face till it shone like a polished apple, put on Bud’s choice of a cap and streamered apron, and was about to take a generous dash of Florida Water when she found her hand restrained.
“I’d have no scent,” said Bud. “I like scent myself, some, and I just dote on our Florida Water, but Auntie Ailie says the scent of clean water, sun, and air, is the sweetest a body can have about one, and any other kind’s as rude as Keating’s Powder.”
“He’ll be expecting the Florida Water,” said Kate, “seeing it was himself that sent it.”
“It don’t amount to a hill of beans,” said Bud; “you can wear our locket, and that’ll please him.”
Kate went with a palpitating heart through the scullery, out into the garden, with a basket in her hand, a pleasing and expansive figure. Bud would have liked to watch her, but a sense of delicacy prevented, and she stood at the kitchen window looking resolutely into the street. On his way down the stairs Mr Dyce was humming the Hundredth Psalm; outside the shops were shuttered, and the harmony of the morning hymn came from the baker’s open windows. A few folk passed in their Sunday clothes, at a deliberate pace, to differentiate it from the secular hurry of other days. Soon the church bell would ring for the Sabbath-school, and Bud must be ready. Remembering it, a sense of some impiety took possession of her – worldly trysts in back gardens on the Sabbath were not what Aunt Bell would much approve of. Had they met yet? How did Charles look? What did Kate say?
“Mercy on me!” cried the maid, bursting in through the scullery. “Did you say I was to whistle!”
“Of course,” said Bud, and then looked horrified. “Oh, Kate,” said she in a whisper, “I was so keen on the vain things of this wicked world I quite forgot it was the Lord’s Day; of course you can’t go whistling on Sunday.”
“That’s what I was just thinking to myself,” said the maid, not very heartily. “But I thought I would ask you. It wouldn’t need to be a tune, but – but of course it would be awful wicked – forbye Miss Dyce would be sure to hear me, and she’s that particular.”
“No, you can’t whistle – you daren’t,” said Bud. “It’d be dre’ffle wicked. But how’d it do to throw a stone? Not a rock, you know, but a nice little quiet wee white Sunday pebble? You might like as not be throwing it at Rodger’s cats, and that would be a work of necessity and mercy, for these cruel cats are just death on birds.”
“But there’s not a single cat there,” explained the maid.
“Never mind,” said Bud. “You can heave the pebble over the wall so that it’ll be a warning to them not to come poaching in our garden; there’s sure to be some on the other side just about to get on the wall, and if Charles happens to be there too, can you help that?” and Kate retired again.
There was a pause, and then a sound of laughter. For ten minutes Bud waited in an agony of curiosity, that was at last too much for her, and she ventured to look out at the scullery window – to see Charles chasing his adored one down the walk, between the bleaching-green and the gooseberries. Kate was making for the sanctuary of her kitchen, her face aflame, and all her streamers flying, but was caught before she entered.
“I told you!” said she, as she came in panting. “We hadn’t said twenty words when he wanted to kiss me.”
“Why! was that the reason you ran?” asked Bud, astonished.
“Ye – yes,” said the maid.
“Seems to me it’s not very encouraging to Charles, then.”
“Yes, but – but – I wasn’t running all my might,” said Kate.