“Oh, there you are, Ruby!” her step-mother says as the little girl comes into the room. “What did you run away for, child? Mr. Kirke fancies you must have been shy of him.”
“Little girls often are,” says Mr. Kirke, with that smile which illumines an otherwise plain face. “They think I’m cross.”
“I don’t think so!” decides Ruby, suddenly. She is gazing up into those other brown eyes above her, and is fascinated, as most others are, by Jack Kirke’s face—a face stern in repose, and far from beautiful, but lit up by a smile as bright as God’s own sunlight, and as kind.
“You don’t think so?” repeats the young man, with another smile for the fair little face uplifted to his. He puts his arm round the child as he speaks, and draws her towards him. “You are the little girl who thinks such a lot of Scotland,” Jack Kirke says.
“How did you know?” Ruby questions, looking up with wide brown eyes.
“I rather think a little bird must have sung it to me as I came along,” the stranger answers gravely. “Besides, I’m Scotch, so of course I know.”
“Oh-h!” ejaculates Ruby, her eyes growing bigger then. “Tell me about Scotland.”
So, with one arm round Ruby, the big brown eyes gazing up into the honest ones above her, and the sunshine, mellowed by the down-drawn blinds, flooding on the two brown heads, Jack Kirke tells the little girl all about the unknown land of Scotland, and his birthplace, the grey little seaport town of Greenock, on the beautiful river Clyde.
“You must come and see me if ever you come to Scotland, you know, Ruby,” he tells her. “I’m on my way home now, and shall be jolly glad to get there; for, after all, there’s no place like home, and no place in all the world like bonnie Scotland.”
“Do you think that too?” Ruby cries delightedly. “That’s what mamma always says, and Jenny. I don’t remember Scotland,” Ruby continues, with a sigh; “but I dare say, if I did, I should say it too. And by next Christmas I shall have seen it. Dad says, ‘God willing;’ but I don’t see the good of that when we really are going to go. Do you, Mr. Kirke?”