“It warms an old heart to hear young lips recite the good old rhymes.”
But, after all, the exterior of the grand old building and the view interested the girls more than the Crown Room inside or even the museum, and it was not long before they were on their way to the Old Town whose tortuous narrow streets and toppling houses, some of them ten stories high and more, were the most picturesque tenements the Motor Maids had ever seen. Through the crooked alleys they wandered, peeping under dark arches and up long flights of steps. Occasionally at the end of a tunnel-like street, narrow enough to touch the walls on either side, they caught a glimpse of a white sail on a deep blue strip of water.
At last, entirely unconscious that they were footsore and weary to the point of shedding tears, they descended by one of the quaint streets to Holyrood Palace, gray and silent, where the rooms of the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots are still preserved.
How many murders were done behind those old walls! What a nest of intrigue and plots it had once been! Suddenly, Miss Helen Campbell began to feel her nerves. Hunger and fatigue had done their work.
“Billie,” she exclaimed in a weak voice, “I am sure Holyrood Palace feels no older than I do this minute. I am ready to crumble into a handful of dust. If it’s not lunch time, we must go back to the hotel and rest a bit.”
Billie looked at her watch.
“Heavens!” she ejaculated. “We haven’t but two minutes to reach Cousin Annie’s. Oh, dear! And we did want to be on time.”
They tried to find two cabs, but the Palace is in a mean quarter of the city and there was no cab in sight. They tried to hasten the lagging footsteps of the little lady, but for some inexplicable reason she lagged the more.
“I will not be rushed along,” she cried. “Annie Campbell can wait. She’s been waiting for sixty years. It won’t hurt her to wait a little longer.”
“Waiting for what, Cousin Helen,—a husband?” asked Billie, who also was weary and hungry to the point of extreme exasperation.