“I will be the woman,” she cried, with a playful blow on his shoulder; “it is me that will make it home. And you will be the man. And if any stranger comes into it—not to say a poor, motherless bairn like what I was—their hearts will sing for pleasure; for there will be one for kindness and warmness, and one for protecting and caring, and that will make it home. Uncle Robert was but one, and not one that was caring. If you were there, he just let you be. ‘Oh,’ he would say, ‘you are here!’ as if it was a surprise. Do you wonder that I hunger and thirst for my own home, Ronald, when I never had in my life any thing but that?”
“It will come in its time, my Lily,” he said, holding her close to him, with her hands in his.
“Ay, but you mind what Shakespeare says: ‘While the grass grows——’”
“If the proverb was musty then,” said Ronald, with a laugh, “it’s mustier now.”
“So it is; but as true as ever. And I weary for it, I weary for it!” cried the girl. “However, sit you there, and me here; and we’ll think it is our own house—that you will have come in, and you will have had your dinner, and you will be telling me every thing that has passed in the day.”
“What, all the pleas before the Fifteen, and old Watty’s speeches, and the jokes of Johnny Law, and the wiles of——”
“Every one of them! When you are in a profession, you should know every thing about it. If you were a—tailor, say, who would make your fine buttonholes, and the braiding of the grand waistcoats, but your wife? Or a—school-master it would be me to look after the exercises; and wherefore not an advocate’s wife to know all about the Parliament House, and how to conduct a case if there should be occasion?”
“So that you might go down to the court instead of me, and plead for me if I had a headache,” said Ronald, laughing. “It would be grand for my clients, Lily, for I’ll answer for it, with Symington on the bench, and Hoodiecraw and the two Elders, you would gain every plea.”
“That’s while I am young and——” said Lily, with a little toss of her head. She was saucy and gay and full of malice, as he had never seen her, for this was not much Lily’s way. “I did not say I would plead; but I would have to know. Every thing you would have to tell me, as well as the jokes of the old lords.”
“Well,” said Ronald, “I might do that, and you would take no harm, for you would not understand them, my Lily. But they all like a bonnie lass, and you would win every plea. I’ll tell you all the stories, Lily, and there are plenty of them. The plainstanes of the Parliament House know more human trouble and vice than any other place in Edinburgh. I’ll tell you——”