'What the dooce is he saying, Mrs. Prune?' asked Mr. Gaskins, in sore perplexity, as he carefully wiped his cockaded hat with a white handkerchief.
'Ye kenna what I am saying?' asked Archie, with contemptuous surprise.
'No, Mr. Hackindore, you must excuse me really.'
'Out of the world and into Kippen?' said Archie, with a toss of his head.
'And how is Sir Ranald, Mrs. Prune?' asked Gaskins.
'The laird is a wee thing dwining again,' said Archie, ere she could reply. 'They say aye ailin' ne'er fills the kirk-yard; but I'm fearsome at times this is the last blaze o' the candle in the socket,' he added, with a little break in his voice.
On the day of this visit Sir Ranald was not visible at all, and Lord Cadbury had Alison all to himself in the little drawing-room, where he was fast resuming his old airs of property and protection, and almost venturing to make what he deemed love in dull and emotionless tones; and Alison, had she not been grieved by her father's condition, and worried by the whole situation, might have laughed at Cadbury's Don Juanesque posing as too absurd.
'I shall never be able to describe to you,' said he, for the tenth time, 'my profound alarm and grief when I lost you so mysteriously at Antwerp.'
'In a place to which I should never have gone.'
'Not even with me?' he asked, softly.