“It was May she was thinking about,” she repeated, as she went down the street.
She looked “bonny and bright—a sicht for sair e’en,” Nannie, her aunt’s maid, said, when she came in. She did not stay very long. She had intended to spend the day, but Marion Calderwood was going home with her, and she would have to come another day, she told her aunt.
Indeed Marion came in before dinner was over, and Jean was glad to have a long walk and the young girl’s gay companionship, rather than an afternoon of quiet under her aunt’s keen, though loving, eyes.
Chapter Eleven.
A Visitor.
Mr Dawson was longer away than he had intended to be when he left. A visit was made to the Corbetts on the way, and from thence came a letter telling Jean to prepare to receive another visitor when her father should return. Hugh, the Corbett who came next after Emily, a schoolboy of fourteen, had been so unfortunate as to hurt his knee in some of his holiday wanderings during the previous summer, and had been a prisoner in the house for months, and Mr Dawson proposed to bring him to Portie for a change.
Jean was promised no pleasure from the visit. The lad was ill, and “ill to do with,” irritable and impatient of his long confinement in the house. There was little enough space in the Corbett house for those who were well, and it would do the lad good to see something else besides the four walls of the rather dim parlour where he had been a prisoner so long. He must be a prisoner even at Saughleas for a time, poor lad; but when the spring came so that he could get out, and get the good of the sea air, he would doubtless be better; and in the mean time, said her father, Jean must make the best of him.
The next letter was from London, telling of their safe arrival, and kind reception, but neither that nor the next, told the day on which Mr Dawson might be expected home. Indeed it told nothing in a very satisfactory manner; but Jean gathered that they found themselves in very favourable circumstances for seeing many of the wonderful sights of London, and the only thing they seemed to regret was, that Jean was not there to enjoy it all with them. A good many names of people and places were mentioned, but no very clear idea was conveyed with regard to them all, and Jean was advised to wait patiently for her father’s return to hear more; and this she was content to do.