Bewilderment still reigned in Alison's eyes and brain. 'Must I leave them all,' she whispered, 'my sisters and Jacky—?'
'Ay, must you,' said Nancy, with a little not unnatural impatience, 'or stay, and be taken from them by ogre Cheape in a fortnight!'
'In a fortnight! Was he coming so soon?' said Alison, with a white face, and then the magnitude of her friend's action on her behalf dawning upon her, she cried, with a half sob, 'Oh, Nancy! how can I thank you for this deliverance?'
'Then you'll come, Ally?'
'Come? How can I fail?' said Alison. 'And, Nancy, what'll I say? But I'll not speak, I'll do. I'll try with all my strength to do something that shall reward you. I'll be your servant, anything!'
'Be my own friend, sweetest—'tis enough,' said Nancy. 'And now, mind, not a moment later than the half after four. 'Twill be as pitch as night, a strange start. I protest 'tis a perfect adventure! I'd not have missed it for worlds. Keep a good heart, Ally, just not too soft, you know, and brave.' And she tip-toed away again, nodding and smiling.
Alison rose and dressed, and did not sleep again that night, but sat still by Jacky's cot, her young brain whirling with confused, grave thoughts. When it was time to go she kissed Jacky, pulled up the coverlet where he had tossed it from his rosy limbs, and smoothed his curls, that were so like her own. He had been her charge since birth, and now she was leaving him to others. She took a last look round the bare little room of her maidenhood, and then with her bundle in her hand, she slipped away down to the distant kitchen to light a stealthy fire, so that Nancy might have a cup of chocolate to start on. The old house of her childhood seemed full of accusing shadows as she flitted through it, dark and cold and strange to the eye in these unholy hours. She was thankful when Nancy joined her; they both crouched over the fire, for it was bitter cold. Both, too, heard presently, with the sharp ears of excitement, the distant rumble of wheels. The chaise had come.
The laird put his head in at the back door.
'Come, lasses,' he said. He had a lantern, and they followed him out into the starlight of the winter morning. A wind, forlorn and cold as the grave, blew in their faces. The chaise was already piled with Nancy's goods—the laird's doing with his own hands. Alison could see the rough familiar figure of him moving about with the lantern, the father whose weakness and whose strength she knew and understood, the man so much finer and nobler than the woman who ruled him. The heart of the girl yearned over him, and she flung her arms round his neck.
'There was nothing for it but to run, Ally,' he said, patting her shoulder. And then he helped her into the coach, for she stumbled, blind with tears. And then the coach rolled away into the dark, leaving the laird alone at the postern, whence presently he turned slowly away. For in an hour's time he had to meet his wife; and it is my opinion that, in these degenerate days of ours, a man has won the Victoria Cross for less.