“I hope the curse has passed away now,” gaily said the young mother, “and that the latest scion will not be a golden-tressed damsel. Yet look here”—and she touched the soft down beneath her infant's cap, which might, by a considerable exercise of imagination, be called hair—“it is yellow, you see, Elspie! But I'll not believe your tradition. My child shall be both beautiful and beloved.”
Smitten with a sudden pang, poor Elspie cried, “Oh, my leddy, dinna think o' the future. Dinna!”—— and she stopped, confused.
“Really, how strange you are. But go on. We'll have no more Christinas nor Isobels.”
Hurriedly, Elspie continued to relate the histories: of noble Jean Rothesay, who died by an arrow aimed at her husband's heart; and Alison, her sister, the beauty of James the Fifth's reckless court, who was “no gude;” and Mistress Katharine Rothesay, who hid two of the “Prince's” soldiers after Culloden, and stood with a pair of pistols before their bolted door.
“Nay, I'll have none of these—they frighten me,” said Sybilla, “I wonder I ever had courage to marry the descendant of such awful women. No! my sweet innocent! you shall not be christened after them,” she continued, stroking the baby cheek with her soft finger. “You shall not be like them at all, except in their beauty. And they were all handsome—were they, Elspie?”
“Ne'er a ane o' the Rothesay line, man or woman, that wasna fair to see.”
“Then so will my baby be!—like her father, I hope—or just a little like her mother, who is not so very ugly, either; at least, Angus says not.” And Mrs. Rothesay drew up her tiny figure, patted one dainty hand—the wedded one—with its fairy fellow; then—touched perhaps with a passing melancholy that he who most prized her beauty, and for whose sake she most prized it herself, was far away—she leaned back and sighed.
However, in a few minutes, she cried out, her words showing how light and wandering was the reverie, “Elspie, I have a thought! The baby shall be christened Olive!”
“It's a strange, heathen name, Mrs. Rothesay.”
“Not at all. Listen how I chanced to think of it. This very morning, just before you came to waken me, I had such a queer, delicious dream.”