“I hope you have quite recovered from the fatigues of your journey, Mrs. Charles Heriot?” he said. “Sad as it was, and sore as this home-coming must have been, I hope you have now settled down. It is a favourable time of year for this part of the country, and I may say, under Providence, that it’s a very good season. We have had more bright weather than ordinary, and everything is looking very well. I hope you are beginning to like your new home?”
“Yes, I suppose it has been good weather for Scotland; but not at all like what we have been used to. I think sometimes I shall die of the cold,” and she muffled herself closely in the shawl which she had thrown off on coming in, “and the children feel it so very much.”
“Oh, but it’s new life to the children, my dear! You’ll soon find that,” cried good Mrs. Murray, “though yours are very young to be sure. My eldest daughter’s children have just come to the Manse, from the Bombay Presidency. Poor things, they were white enough and miserable enough when they came, but since then they have flourished every day.”
“Oh, indeed,” said Matilda, with a stare; “but my children have always been taken such care of; and they feel the cold very much.”
As if our bairns were not well taken care of! Mrs. Murray said to herself, and she was wroth in her heart, and concluded that this was more than gaucheréé, whatever the Doctor might say. The Doctor was not quite so easily discouraged.
“When you have been here a little longer,” he said, “and have got used to our ways, you will find it a pleasant neighbourhood—a very pleasant neighbourhood. St. Andrews is not too far for a drive, and there are a great many very agreeable families—”
“Oh, I shall never care for the Fifeshire society. They must be so stiff and so dry,” said Matilda; “and then they are all such friends of the old family, and set against us—”
“My sister means,” said Verna, “that people have not been very nice since we came. We have had a great many cards, but nobody has really paid us a visit, except yourselves.”
“They would think she was seeing nobody,” said Mrs. Murray, softly, “and very natural;” but once more the Doctor made himself the spokesman, drowning the gentle voice of his wife.
“I have always heard,” he said, “that there was a natural stiffness about our Scotch manners; but Mrs. Charles may be assured, and I take it upon me to say so, though I’m not a rash man by nature, that all that will soon disappear before her face. I hope it was not impertinent to look at the plans on the table. They are, perhaps, for some house in England?”