“I’m glad you’re come home,” said Jeanie, with instinctive policy ignoring this reproof. “Grannie is in her bed, and it is lonely without you. Will I make you some tea? or will you have your supper? You’ve been long away.”
“Not so very long,” said Edgar, touched by the soft complaint, “but I ought to have recollected that you were alone. Are you afraid, Jeanie, at night with no one but Bell and the granny to take care of you? It is a lonely house.”
“Oh, no,” said Jeanie, looking brightly round upon him, as he followed her into the low parlour, where two candles were flickering on the table before the fire.
“But it is a lonely house?”
“Oh, yes,” she repeated softly, “but what o’ that? Nobody would meddle with us. Granny is as well known as Loch Arroch Kirk. Nobody dares meddle with us. I’m never lonely, except when granny is ill and goes to her bed, and I can hear Bell and Sandy in the kitchen. That makes me think I would like somebody to speak to, too.”
“But Bell and Sandy,”—Edgar began: if he was going to be so incautious as to add,—“are sweethearts,” I don’t know what would have become of him; but happily Jeanie, with a sudden blush interposed.
“I was not meaning Bell and Sandy; any voices have the same sound. They make you feel how lone you are.”
“That is true,” said Edgar, seating himself by the fire, which Jeanie had kept bright, with a clean-swept hearth, and a clear red glow for his coming. He sat down meditatively in the old mother’s chair. “That is true,” he repeated slowly, “I have felt it often of winter nights when I have gone upstairs to my chilly room, and heard the people chatting together as I passed their doors.”
“You have felt that, too?” said Jeanie timidly, with reverential wonder, “but you need never be your lane unless you like.”
“I assure you I have often been ‘my lane,’ as you call it, when I did not like at all,” said Edgar smiling, “you have much too high an opinion, Jeanie, of what I can do ‘if I like.’”