One morning, however, she received a letter from Doris which roused her not a little.
"Kirkstoun is somewhere near Borrowness, is it not?" wrote her friend. "If so, I shall see you before Christmas. Those friends of mine at St Rules, to whom you declined an introduction, have a stall at the Town Hall bazaar, and I am going over to assist them. It is a kind of debt, for they helped me with my last enterprise of the kind, but I should contrive to get out of it except for the prospect of seeing you.
"You will come to the bazaar, of course: I should think you would be ready for a little dissipation by that time; and I will promise to be merciful if you will visit my stall."
"How delightful!" was Mona's first thought; "how disgusting!" was her second; "how utterly out of keeping Doris will be with me and my surroundings!" was her conclusion. "Ponies and pepper-pots do not harmonise very well with shops and poor relations. But, fortunately, the situation is not of my making."
She was still meditating over the letter when Rachel came in looking flushed and excited.
"Mona," she said, "I have made a nice little engagement for you. You know you say you like singing?"
"Yes," said Mona, with an awful premonition of what might be coming.
"I met Mr Stuart on the Kirkstoun road just now. He was that put about! Two of his best speakers for the soirée to-night have fallen through, he says. Mr Roberts has got the jaundice, and Mr Dowie has had to go to the funeral of a friend. Mr Stuart said the whole thing would be a failure, and he was fairly at his wits' end. You see there's no time to do anything now. He said if he could get a song or a recitation, or anything, it would do; so of course I told him you were a fine singer, and I was sure you would give us a song. You should have seen how his face brightened up. 'Capital!' said he; 'I have noticed her singing in church. Perhaps she would give us "I know that my Redeemer liveth," or something of that kind?'"
"My dear cousin," said Mona, at last finding breath to speak, "you might just as well ask me to give a performance on the trapeze. I have never sung since I was in Germany. It is one thing to chirp to you in the firelight, and quite another to stand up on a public platform and perform. The thing is utterly absurd."
"Hoots," said Rachel, "they are not so particular. Many's the time I have seen them pleased with worse singing than yours."