“Guid enough yet.” Christina had not gone far when through all her resentment the full meaning of the words forced itself upon her. “Oh,” she told herself crossly, “I never meant him to take it that way.” A little later she told herself the same thing, but merely impatiently. And still later, lying in the dark, she repeated it with a sob.
As for the watcher, Willie Thomson, he set out without undue haste to inform Jessie Mary that once more Macgregor had been left standing alone on the pavement. Somehow Willie was not particularly pleased with himself this evening. Ere his lagging feet had borne him half way to the appointed place he was feeling sorry for Macgregor. All at once he decided to spy no more. It would be rather awkward just at present to intimate such a decision to Jessie Mary, but he could “cod” her, he thought, without much difficulty, by inventing reports in the future. Cheered by his virtuous resolutions, he quickened his pace.
Jessie Mary received him in the close leading to her abode. She was in an extraordinarily bad temper, and cut short his report almost at the outset by demanding to know when he intended repaying the shilling he had borrowed a fortnight previously.
“Next week,” mumbled Willie, with that sad lack of originality exhibited by nearly all harassed borrowers.
Whereupon Jessie Mary, who was almost a head the taller, seized him by one ear and soundly cuffed the other until with a yelp he broke loose and fled into the night, never to know that he had been punished for that unfortunate remark of Macgregor’s—“it doesna matter.” Yet let us not scoff at Jessie Mary’s sense of justice. The possessors of greater minds than hers, having stumbled against a chair, have risen in their wrath and kicked the sofa—which is not at all to say that the sofa’s past has been more blameless than the chair’s. Life has a way of settling our accounts without much respect for our book-keeping.
Jessie Mary felt none the better of her outbreak. She went to bed wishing angrily that she had taken Macgregor at his word. The prospects of obtaining an escort to the dance were now exceedingly remote, for only that afternoon she had learned that the bandy-legged young man in the warehouse whom she had deemed “safe at a pinch,” and who was the owner of a dress suit with a white vest, had invited another girl and was actually going to give her flowers to wear.
Willie went to bed, too, earlier than usual, and lay awake wondering, among other things, whether his aching ear entitled him to a little further credit in the matter of his debt to Jessie Mary—not that any length of credit would have made payment seem possible. For Willie was up to the neck in debt, owing the appalling sum of five shillings and ninepence to an old woman who sold newspapers, paraffin oil and cheap cigarettes, and who was already threatening to go to his aunt for her money—a proceeding which would certainly result in much misery for Willie. He was “out of a job” again; but it isn’t easy to get work, more especially when one prefers to do nothing. To some extent Macgregor was to blame for his having got into debt with the tobacconist, for if Macgregor had not stopped smoking, Willie would not have needed to buy nearly so many cigarettes. Nevertheless, Willie’s thoughts did not dwell long or bitterly on that point. Rather did they dwell on Macgregor himself. And after a while Willie drew up his legs and pulled the insufficient bedclothes over his head and lay very still. This he had done since he was a small boy, when lonesomeness got the better of him, when he wished he had a father and mother like Macgregor’s.
And, as has been hinted, neither was Christina at ease that night.
Indeed, it were almost safe to say that of the four young people involved in this little tragicomedy, Macgregor, yawning over his old school dictionary, was the least unhappy.