“Aye! she’s ilka body’s body, with her bonny, blue-lit face,” thought the chauffeur catching the beam from those blue eyes and throwing it back. “But the other—our lassie.” He caught his breath. “She’s ‘eye-sweet’! An’ she’s the black o’ her parents’ eye—meanin’ the apple. If hurt—should—come to her.”
One might say that Una was the apple of his grim eye, too—judging by the anxiety with which it rested upon her—the parting anxiety.
Una was looking, in somewhat homesick fashion at him, too, now, as if she was burning all her bridges behind her, as she tossed him the smart little fur coat, with its rose-satin lining torn by the red fox’s tooth and claw.
“Ask ‘Mither Jeanie’ to mend it for me,” she said, playfully alluding to Andrew’s wife, “and send it along to me, to the horse-farm. If we don’t get back until September and it’s cold among the mountains, I may need it. Good-bye Andrew—my ‘fuffle-daddy’.... I call him that since he tossed me, like a doll, into the back of the car and took all the battering—all the glass of the windshield in himself,” she murmured in Pemrose’s ear, turning away with a tear in her dark eye from the parting hand-shake with the chauffeur.
One and all of the band of twenty now shook hands with Andrew—all with the momentary forlorness of burning bridges, as they looked at the great purple-cushioned, radio-equipped touring car, symbol of civilization—at his long-coated form towering beside it.
Andrew’s eye was correspondingly misty: “Fegs! I’m sorry I threated ye with the fiery stick—as I couldn’t stick by ye to meet it,” he muttered dryly. “Well! fair good luck to ye, ma’am,” to the Guardian. “An’ may ye find yerselves happy an’ home-at, among the old mountains!”
The wild mountains were “home-at” with them—very much at home to Camp Fire Girls—so the echoes presently testified, catching up the blithe chorus written by Pemrose to Una’s marching song:
“Brace up your packs and march along,
And set the echoes ringing,
Till woods and hills and Camp Fire Girls