"And is her tongue ony quater? Eh, that lassie! When we were neibours at Achree I tell ye she fair deaved a body. You'll no mind--ye were young at the time--that I had to ask the hoosekeeper to let me sleep in anither room. Naebody could sleep wi' Elspeth. She wud speak even in her sleep. We were a' sorry for Maclure. But, of course, he was a quate man, or there wad hae been ructions."
Isla retailed a few items of Glenogle and Lochearn gossip for Mrs. Fraser's benefit, and finally returned to the subject of the room.
"I can tak' ye doon to see it, Miss Isla. I was as far as the dining-room yesterday."
Isla thanked her, and together they went down one flight of stairs and entered a large, wide room with two long windows looking out upon a microscopic back-yard, in which was a solitary tree. Though it was little more than noon the room was rather gloomy, and Agnes pointed out that it was the projecting portions of the neighbouring houses that darkened the windows.
"If I get employment I shall be out most of the day, and in the evenings I shall have a fire, and then it will be quite cosy. So these are the Frenchman's pictures! Why, some of them are very pretty."
He had done some sketches in water colour on the panels of the door and also on the sides of the mantel-piece; and, though the furniture was a little hopeless and rather suggestive of the cheaper end of the Tottenham Court Road, Isla was thankful to get it.
But Agnes Fraser felt a little despondent about it all the afternoon, and when Fraser, who was steward at a West-End club, came home at tea-time to see how she was, he found that she had been crying.
He also took a gloomy view of Miss Mackinnon's venture into the unknown.
"It's only her fad, Nance. And afore she has had time to get tired o't or even to get a grup o' the rael thing she'll rue it, or some o' them will come and tak' her away. So let her come, and dinna you fash your heid aboot her. Eh, woman, I'm gled to see ye in a frock at last!"
About six o'clock that evening a four-wheeler trundled up to Mrs. Fraser's house in Cromer Street, and Isla with all her belongings was admitted to her new quarters.