Evidently she thought the idea originated with her mother, and was pressed upon me against my inclination. Seeing that I should gain nothing by undeceiving her, I laughed the matter off, and we drifted into a talk about the garden, and the croup among Mr. Blair's bare-footed children at the Mill o' Sterrin a mile away.
According to all precedent among lovelorn maidens, Babiole ought to have got over her love malady as a child gets over the measles, or else she ought to have dwindled into 'the mere shadow of her former self' and to have found a refined consolation in her beloved hills. But instead of following either of these courses, the little maid began to evince more and more the signs of a marked change, which showed itself chiefly in an inordinate thirst for work of every kind. She began by a renewed and feverish devotion to her studies with me, and assiduous practice on my piano whenever I was out, to get the fullest possible benefit from her music lessons at Aberdeen. This, I thought, was only the outcome of her expressed desire to become an accomplished woman. But shortly afterwards she relieved her mother of the whole care of the cottage, filling up her rare intervals of time in helping Janet. Walks were given up, with the exception of a short duty-trot each day to Knock Castle or the Mill o' Sterrin and back again. When I remonstrated, telling her she would lose her health, she answered restlessly—
'Oh, I hate walking, it is more tiring than all the work—much more tiring! And one gets quite as much air in the garden as on Craigendarroch, without catching cold.'
She was always perfectly sweet and good with me, but she confessed to me sometimes, with tears in her eyes, that she was growing impatient and irritable with her mother. I had waited as eagerly as the girl herself for another letter from Fabian Scott, but when the hope of receiving one had died away, I did not dare to say anything about the sore subject.
About the middle of December she broke down. It was only a cold, she said, that kept her in the cottage and even forced her to lay aside all her incessant occupations. But she had worked so much too hard lately that she was not strong enough to throw it off quickly, and day after day, when I went to see her, I found my dear witch lying back in the high wooden rocking-chair in the sitting-room, with a very transparent-looking skin, a poor little pink-tipped nose, and large, luminous, sad eyes that had no business at all in such a young face.
On the fifth day I was alone with her, Mrs. Ellmer having fussed off to the kitchen about dinner. I was in a very sentimental mood indeed, having missed my little sunbeam frightfully. Babiole had pushed her rocking-chair quickly away from the table, which was covered with a map and a heap of old play-bills. By the map lay a pencil, which the girl had laid down on my entrance.
'What were you doing when I came in?' I asked, after a few questions about her health.
The colour came back for a moment to her face as she answered—
'I was tracing our old journeys together, mamma's and mine; and looking at those old play-bills with her name in them.'
The occupation seemed to me dismally suggestive.