'And to think that I was putting poor Ally down for an old maid!' she exclaimed, rapturously. 'The girl with never a man after her yet, and then to have this rich husband flung at her head! She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, after all—poor Ally!'
'Bide a wee!' said the laird, cautiously. 'Wait till you see the man, my woman! A grey beard, even like myself, and speckled like a puddock wi' the cow-pox. I doubt the girl will get a scunner when she sees him.'
But his partner pounced upon his doubts with righteous anger.
'Laird,' she said, 'if I see you putting the like o' that into Ally's head, I'll be at the end of my patience. Setting the lass against her meat that gait—such foolery!'
'Lasses think of love—' began the laird.
'Love, indeed!' almost screamed the lady; 'and what right has she to think of love, and her almost twenty, and never a jo to her name yet, or a man's kiss but her father's on the cheek o' her? When I was her age, well knew I what love was; but she—let her thank her stars she's got this chance, and needna pine a spinster all her days!'
'Well, well,' said the laird, uncomfortably, 'manage it your own way. I'll keep my fingers out of the pie. And sort you Mr. Cheape of Kincarley when he comes to-morrow, for I'll ha' none of him!'
His lady, finding he would respond on the subject no longer, bustled off to her daughter.
CHAPTER II.
'Ally, Ally!' she called in her clear, strong voice all over the house, 'where are you, Ally?' and through the darkening passages she went in eager search of her eldest daughter. The seven lasses of The Mains were variously disposed of in the old warren of a house—in the lesser rooms, in the attics under the roof, reached by a spiral wooden stair, on which their young feet clattered up and down from early morn till early bed-time.