“Thank you,” he said. “I like to believe it.”
[CHAPTER XIV—VANE SAILS NORTH.]
It was growing dusk on the evening of Vane’s departure when he walked out of Nairn’s room. His host was with him, and when they entered an adjacent room, where a lamp was burning, the older man’s face relaxed into a smile as he saw Jessie Horsfield talking to his wife. Vane stopped a few minutes to speak to them, and it was Jessie who gave the signal for the group to break up.
“I must go,” she said to Mrs. Nairn. “I’ve already stayed longer than I intended. I’ll let you have those patterns back in a day or two.”
“Mair patterns!” Nairn exclaimed with dry amusement. “It’s the second lot this week; ye’re surely industrious, Jessie. Women”—he addressed Vane—“have curious notions of economy. They will spend a month knitting a thing to give to somebody who does not want it, when they could buy it for half a dollar done better by machinery. I’m no saying, however, that it does not keep them out of mischief.”
Jessie laughed. “I don’t think many of us are industrious in that, way now. After all, isn’t it a pity that so many of the beautiful old handicrafts are dying out? No loom, for instance, could turn out some of the things your wife makes. They’re matchless.”
“She has an aumrie—ye can translate it trunk—full of them,” said Nairn. “It’s no longer customary to scatter them ower the house.”
Mrs. Nairn’s smile was half a sigh. “There were no books, and no mony amusements, when I was young,” she said to Jessie. “We sat through the long winter forenights, counting stitches, at Burnfoot, under the Scottish moors. That, my dear, was thirty years ago.”
She shook hands with Vane, who left the house with Jessie, and watched them cross the lawn.
“I’m thinking ye’ll no see so much of Jessie for the next few weeks,” Nairn, who had accompanied her to the door, remarked. “Has she shown ye any of yon knick-knacks when she finished them.”