“Well, as an impartial person who hasn’t seen him,” put in Babbie, “I think there’s a good deal in his ideas. Lots of American tourists are frights. Wouldn’t you be mad, if you lived in Ayr, to see them swarming around the Burns relics and turning the town into pandemonium every pleasant day all summer?”
“I certainly should,” admitted Babe, “but all the same I wouldn’t be rude about it. I’d move away.”
“Oh, but perhaps you couldn’t,” began Betty seriously. “If you were old, you know, and your business was there——”
Whereupon the other three burst into peals of laughter at her earnestness, and couldn’t sober down even at the prospect of scandalizing the bookseller as much as they had the crabbed old stationer. But the bookseller proved to be a brisk young fellow with an eye for trade, and no national prejudices. He sold them two paper-covered guides to the region around Oban, which, he assured them, would tell them all about Flora Macdonald, and all about Dunstaffnage castle as well. He too had post-cards, and Babe bought some, “on principle,” she explained, because he was so very agreeable to Americans.
After dinner it rained harder than ever, so the girls gathered in Miss MacNish’s parlor, the use of which, they had discovered, went with “lodgings.” They had exhausted the guide-books, written on most of their post-cards, decided to go to Iona on the first pleasant day, if there ever was one, and were beginning to feel very dull indeed, when Miss MacNish’s funny little maid appeared to say that there were two gentlemen down-stairs; and should she bring them right up?
“It’s John and Mr. Dwight, of course,” said Babbie gleefully. “Isn’t it jolly of them to come all this way through the rain to see us?”
“We got drowned out,” John explained. “It’s the first rain since we began to camp, and we found it most horribly wetting. So we folded our tent like the Arabs, silently stole with it to the farmer’s barn, and took up our quarters at the hotel nearest Daisybank Villa. And here we are.”
“Wad ye like an early tea for your friends?” inquired Miss MacNish, smilingly appearing in the doorway; and Babbie said yes, if it was perfectly convenient.
“We were hoping you’d ask us to tea,” confessed Mr. Dwight laughingly. “We’ve become horribly bored with each other’s society, haven’t we, J.?”
“And we were getting bored with ours,” retorted Madeline. “A rainy day is a dreadful strain on the tourist’s temper, isn’t it?”