“I wad do my best.”
“Because I want you to read a great deal to me. There is so much fine sewing to do, I thought as we worked together one of us could have a needle, the other a book.”
Following out this idea, she gave Maggie a pretty room near her own. Into one adjoining immense quantities of the finest linen and damask were brought. “I am just going to housekeeping, Maggie,” said Mary, “and Drumloch is to have the handsomest napery in Ayrshire. Did you ever see lovelier damask? It is worthy of the most dainty stitches, and it shall have them.” Still Maggie’s domestic status hung in the balance. For a week her meals were served in her own room, on the plea of fatigue. Mary did not feel as if she could put her with the housekeeper and upper servants; she could not quite make up her mind to bring her to her own table. A conversation with Maggie one morning decided the matter. She found her standing at the open window looking over the lovely strath, and the “bonnie Doon,” with eyes full of happy tears.
“It is a sweet spot, Maggie.”
“It is the sweetest spot on earth, I think.”
“If we only had a view of the sea. We might have, by felling timber.”
Maggie shook her head. “I dinna like the sea. ‘There is sorrow on the sea, it canna be quiet.’ [Footnote: Jeremiah 49, v. 23.] I ken’t a fisher’s wife wha aye said, the sweetest promise in a’ the Book, was that in the Revelations, ‘there shall be nae sea there.’”
“Did you ever live near the sea?”
“Ay; I was born on the coast of Fife.”
“Have you any kin living?”