"I am so sorry, but I may not see you, Joey. Mrs. Nicol will take care of you, and put you into your train to-morrow. Good luck.
"Jean Craigie."
There was no help for it. Joey shook hands with kind Mrs. Tresham and thanked her, and walked off beside Mrs. Nicol in the wake of a huge outside porter, who wheeled her trunk on a barrow. They came up into the width and glare of Princes Street, crossed it, turned up a narrower street running at right angles to it, went half-way down, still following the porter, and turned into another narrower still, where narrow "wynds" or thread-like passages showed between the immensely tall old houses. In this street Mrs. Nicol stopped at last, produced a latch-key, and opened the door into a hall made dimly visible by a glimmer only of gas.
"Ye'll be pleased to mount, miss," she said unsmilingly.
Joey mounted four flights of stairs, all covered with slippery linoleum, till she landed at last in a room which looked as though no one could ever have laughed in it from the time the house was built. Four wooden waiting-room chairs stood against the mustard-coloured walls; a square table covered with a mottled brown cloth stood exactly in the centre. A cheap, crudely coloured print of "The last sleep of Argyle" above the chimney-piece was the sole attempt at ornament, unless one counted the dim cruets which occupied, for the want of a side-board, the centre of the dingy and once white-painted mantelpiece. The room was at once cold and stuffy.
"Ye'll be taking your supper here, miss, and then ye shall gang to your bed," Mrs. Nicol informed her, and Joey, seeing nothing whatever to stay up for, agreed meekly. It was not the evening she had pictured to herself, but she must make the best of it. She wrote a pencil post card to Mums, while Mrs. Nicol laid the table and set before her a rather gristly chop, in which she mentioned that the journey had been "all right" and she herself was "all right" too. It seemed better not to mention Miss Craigie's illness, and this rather desolate reception, when she happened to be one of those five children who had promised father to "take care of Mums."
CHAPTER III
The Duties of a Scholarship Kid
"She'll be there, I suppose?"
"Why should she, you mugwump? A scholarship kid won't have an entrance exam like an ordinary new girl."