XI.
There were friends about Miss Mercy none too sorry to witness the discomfiture of this lofty aspirant. Poor Jamie, I fear, got some cross looks for his share in the matter; and tears, which were harder still to bear. John Hughson, who was a prosperous young teamster, began to come in again, and take his pipe of an evening with Jamie. He no longer sat in his shirt-sleeves, and was in other ways much improved. Mercedes was gracious to him evenings; indeed, it was her nature to be gracious to all men. She had a way of looking straight at them with kind eyes, her lips slightly parted, her smile just showing the edges of both upper and under teeth; so that you knew not whether it was sweeter to look at her eyes or her lips, and were lost in the effort to decide. So one day Hughson felt emboldened to ask if he might bear her company to church on Sunday. And Miss Sadie,—as now they called her, for she objected to the name of Mercy, and nothing but Sadie could her friends make out of Mercedes,—Sadie, to please McMurtagh, consented.
But when the Sunday came, poor Hughson, who looked well enough in week-day clothes, became, to her quick eye, impossible in black.
"You see, Sadie, I am bright and early, to be your beau."
There is a fine directness about courtship in Hughson's class,—it puts the dots upon the i's; but Sadie must have preferred them dotless, for she said, "My name is not Sadie."
"Mercy."
"Nor Mercy."
"Mer—Mercedes, then."
"Nor Mercedes alone."
"Well, Miss McMurtagh, though I've known you from a child."