"Is it soup, Jean?" says she, and the wench stopped. "Skim the fat off it, then, for I saw a hussy like you gi'e her mistress soup like that—and she died." My aunt sat up in her bed, her face very stern when Betty talked of Dan shaming himself and his name.
"I will know this," she cried. "I am not ill any more—who is the woman?"
Jean would have spoken at this, but the gipsy whispered: "Begone, or I'll turn your hair white as the driven snaw," and the wench fled with her soup, and spilled most of it in the stone-flagged corridor leading to the kitchen, where she sat and trembled and grat her fill, every now and again catching her yellow locks to make sure no change had started yet.
So here we have Betty whispering—
"Don't vex yoursel', my Leddy; it's juist the lassie's clavers, for Jean cam' in frae the stable, where she had nae right to be, except to be seein' her lad—they ha'e lads on the brain the lassies noo—and greetin' that young Dan had shamed her before the men, and a' because o' a tinker body like Belle here, although the great folk will treat her so kindly; no' that I mean her any harm," she added (erring on the safe side, for Belle's eyes had begun to glow finely); "and then in came Kate and Leezie wi' a tale o' a wean, tied in a tartan shawl, lying in a biss in the wee byre. Then and there they faithered and mithered the bairn, the useless hussies. . . ." The mother's haughty eyes turned to the gipsy.
"I never found you lying, Belle. Is this story true?—a bonny family is this to be among," she cried, her hand pressing the child closer, and maybe she pressed him too tightly, for the boy doubled his baby fist, his wee voice whimpered, and his outflung arm struck his mother in the face.
"Oh, oh," she cried; "will you turn on me too, and leave me for farmer's wenches and tinker women like the lave of your folk?"
The gipsy lass was on her knees at the bedside.
"Lady," she cries, and her face was finely aglow, "nae wonder ye grieved aboot the colour o' the bairn's hair. Are ye a' Dan mad?" Then when she saw the anger in the mother's eyes she cries—
"Ye'll maybe be in a mood to listen to the truth now."