Now, Marion remembered exactly what she was thinking of when she passed Doctor Gate's door, and it did not make her tone any more amiable as she answered,—
"In the first place Aunt Barbara, my name isn't Marie, and I don't choose to be called so, as I have told you before. I am sure I am sorry I forgot the medicine, but I don't see any need for making such a fuss. Grandfather can't be suffering for medicine as long as he is able to go out and plant corn."
"He will cough all night if he does not have it," was Miss Baby's reply; "and you know how Uncle Alick misses his paper in the evening. The long and short of it is, Marion, you must get the supper ready and take care of the milk while I go down with old Ball after the medicine and paper."
"Go down where?" asked Alick, who had just come in.
Miss Baby explained the matter.
"That will you not to-night," said Grandfather McGregor, who had heard the whole story from the outer kitchen, where he had been washing his face and hands. "Ball is lame and you are tired, and it is coming on to rain. I can want my drops and Alick his paper better than we can afford to have you laid up with the rheumatic fever again. Marie, my woman, you must take mare tent another time. You're no a child the day, and you must put away childish things."
Grandfather McGregor's lightest word was law in the household, and Miss Baby at once abandoned her purpose and set about getting supper.
"Well there, child! Don't stand brooding. What's done can't be undone, and what's undone can't be done, more's the pity," said she, seeing Marion was still standing with her hat on looking out of the window. "You must be more careful another time, for it vexes the gude father to have to fault you, and I'm sure you don't want to do that. Go and get ready for your supper."
"Yes, that's all she thinks of, supper, dinner, and breakfast, breakfast, dinner, and supper, the year round," thought Marion as she went to her room. "Never a bit of feeling, never a bit of sympathy, for me. All that goes to Aunt Christian. Oh, if I had only had her chance, what would not I have done? She lives to some purpose, but I—Oh, how wonderful are the decrees of providence!"
Marion did not imagine that she was failing to make use of the chances that came in her way or that there was any want of sympathy in her forgetting the medicine which would ensure her grandfather a good-night's rest, or in omitting to call for the paper which formed for her hard-working uncle almost his only evening's amusement.