"The poor child knew naught," she replied, as she mixed a bowl of broth and set it to keep warm. "The only name she knows is Marie—"
"Which will be spoke no more in my house," broke out my father with a black frown. "I doubt not the lassie's people were rank Papists—"
"Shame on you, Fergus!" cried my mother indignantly, facing him. "When a poor shipwrecked bairn comes and clings her arms about your neck, you name her Papist—shame on you! Begone about your business, and let sleeping dogs lie, Fergus MacDonald. Cameron and Claverhouse are both forgot, and see to it—"
But my father had incontinently fled out the door to get in the sheep, and my mother laughed as she turned to me and bade me give the red cloak a twist to "clear the peat out of it."
Now, that was the manner of the coming of the little maid. Two days later my father took me to Rathesby with him to seek out her folk, if that might be. But no tidings had been brought of any wreck, and the best we might do was to write—with much difficulty, for my father was ever handier with staff than with pen—a letter to Edinburgh, making a rude copy of the arms on the gold buckle, and seeking to know what family bore those arms. No reply ever came to this letter, and whether it ever arrived we never knew.
And for this we were all content enough, I think. The lassie had twined herself about my mother's heart by her winning ways, and that confident, all-trusting matter laid hold strongly upon my father's heart, so that ere many weeks it was decided that she should stay with us until her folk should come to seek her.
I remember that there was some difficulty over naming her, for my father would have called her Ruth, which he plucked at random from the Bible on the hearth. I think my mother was set on calling her Mary, but the name of Mary Stuart was hard in my father's memory, and he would not.
So the weeks lengthened into months, and the months into years, and ever Ruth and I were as brother and sister in the farmstead at Ayrby. She learned English readily enough, but the Gaelic tongue was hard for her, which was great sorrow to my father all his days.