Hope could not forget her disappointment; there was only one consolation in it. In the midst of all these twinkling artificial lights, the star of Helen Buchanan rose clearer and clearer. Helen was a gentlewoman; and what did it matter that she was poor?
“Yonder is Mossgray!” exclaimed Hope, as they approached the house; “yonder he is, up among the trees, and he has got something like a letter in his hand. Do you see him, mother?”
The bank of the wan Water sloped upward into gentle braes, a little beyond the house of Mossgray, and the laird was certainly there, walking among the trees, with a step altogether unlike his usual meditative, slow pace. Hope Oswald was an especial favourite with Mr Graeme of Mossgray, and he liked her mother; but Mrs Oswald had too much regard and sympathy for the old man to intrude on his retirement.
“We will go in and see Mrs Mense, Hope,” she said; “Mossgray seems occupied just now. You will see him another day.”
The large old-fashioned kitchen had a separate entrance to itself. The mass of buildings altogether bore evident testimony to the different periods of their erection, and looked, as their owner said, a natural growth of the homesoil in which the grey walls and rude, dark, massy tower seemed so firmly rooted. A large garden descended from the most modern front of the house to the water, where it was deeply fringed with willows. The clipt, fantastic trees of a generation which admired such clumsy gambols of art were scattered through it, and there was a sun-dial, and many prim flower-beds; but the cherished lilies of Mossgray were not in these stiffly-angled enclosures; their fresh green leaves were beginning to shoot up in the freer borders—those borders on which they gleamed in the dim summer evenings, like errant rays of the moon.
Mrs Mense was a very old woman now, and invalided. She sat in a great elbow-chair by the fireside, spinning feebly sometimes, and sometimes giving counsel, by no means feebly, to her self-willed niece, the housekeeper de facto. The establishment was a very limited one; besides Janet, and the miscellaneous personage known as “Mossgray’s man,” there was only one other servant in the house.
“Eh, Miss Hope, is this you?” said Mrs Mense, “and your mamma nae less, minding the auld wife as she aye does. Effie, ye tawpie, get chairs to the ladies—or are ye gaun ben, Mrs Oswald, to wait for Mossgray?”
“Mossgray is out, I see,” said Mrs Oswald. “No, Hope came to see you, Mrs Mense; we will sit down beside you awhile. That will do, Effie.”
“And look till her how she’s grown!” exclaimed the old woman, “and stout wi’t. Ye’re no gaun to let down our credit, Miss Hope. Ye’ll let the Edinburgh folk see what guid bluid is in thir southland parts. Effie, gar Janet gie ye the wee cheeny luggie fu’ o’ cream. Ye mind it, Miss Hope? it belangs mair to you than to onybody about Mossgray.”
“But, Mrs Mense,” said Hope, “you did not call Crummie’s calf after me, as you said you would.”