This was said by a rough-skinned damsel—the “maid-of-all-work”—who had shown her freckled face inside the parlour door, and whose patois proclaimed her to have come from the same country as McTavish himself.
“Wishes to see me! Who is it, Maggie?”
“Dinna ken who. It’s a rank stranger—a quare-lookin’ callant, wi’ big beard, and them sort o’ whiskers they ca’ moostachoes. I made free to axe him his bisness. He sayed ’twas aboot taakin’ the hoos.”
“About taking the house?”
“Yis, maister. He sayed he’d heared o’ its bein’ to let.”
“Show him in!”
McTavish sprang to his feet, overturning the chair on which he had been seated. Mrs M., and her trio of flaxen-haired daughters, scuttled off into the back parlour—as if a tiger was about to be uncaged in the front one.
They were not so frightened, however, as to hinder them from, in turn, flattening their noses against a panel of the partition door, and scrutinising the stranger through the keyhole.
“How handsome he is!” exclaimed Elspie, the eldest of the girls.
“Quite a military-looking man!” said the second, Jane, after having completed her scrutiny. “I wonder if he’s married.”