“My little brother Fergus, and I’ve never seen him. Ah, I must get to him and to Margret. She’s the same faithful bairnie she ever was,” and Agnes climbed into the cart to look for the first time upon the solemn little face of her two-year-old baby brother.
And then what a chatter there was! Between answering and asking questions Agnes hardly paused, and after a while Dod Hunter, plodding along by the side of his oxen, looked back with a sly twinkle in his eye. Agnes laughed. “I know you think me a great chatterbox, Uncle Dod; but I’ve not seen them for two long years, and my heart fairly seems ready to fly out of my body, and as that doesn’t happen, it is the talk that will fly out of my mouth.”
“I wonder ye’ve the breath left,” said the old man, “if ye kept up the pace from M’Clean’s that ye brought up here with.”
“I didn’t run all the way, but when I got out of breath I had to walk. Ah, but I wanted wings.”
“Do you think we’ve changed her, marm?” asked Dod of Mrs. Kennedy.
“She is taller and not so serious.”
“Who could be serious at such a time?” laughed Agnes.
“And she has a way with her that is new to me.”
“It’s maybe offen Polly O’Neill she has that,” said Dod, wagging his head.
Agnes flushed up. She did not like to be compared to Polly, much as she loved the dear creature, and it was the second time that day that the comparison had been made. “I’ll be my old self now with my mother near me,” she said gravely. “I have run wild, I know, and Polly has not checked me. Polly has not your ways, mother, and sometimes I have been forgetting; but Polly is a good woman and has been like a sister to me.”