“My dearest,” he said, spreading out his hands in deprecation, “it’s like rending me asunder; it is like tearing my heart out of my bosom.”
“I am not asking you what it is like!” cried Lily. “What I am asking is your meaning. Were you thinking of going without me?”
“Lily, Lily!” he said, “don’t be so dreadfully hard upon me! What am I to do? I know nothing else that I can do.”
“Oh, if it’s only that,” she said, “I can tell you, and very easy, what to do. You will just take me down to Kinloch-Rugas, or to that other place where the coach stops, and wrap me well in my camlet cloak and in my tartan plaid, and I’ll not feel the cold, not so much as you will, for women’s blood is warm, and when we get to Edinburgh we will take the topmost story of a house, and make it as warm as a nest, and get the first sunshine and the bonnie view away to Fife and the north. And Beenie will follow us with my things and her own; but we’ll just be all alone for the first day or two, and I will make you your dinner with my own hands,” said Lily, holding up those useful implements with a look of triumph, which was, alas! too bright, which was like the sun when a storm is coming: brilliant with alarm and a sense of something very different to come.
“They don’t look very fit for it, those bits of white hands,” he said, eager, if possible, by any means to divert her from the more important question, and he took her hands in his and kissed them; but Lily was not to be diverted in this way.
“You may think what you like of how they look, but they are just a very useful pair of hands, and can cook you a Scots collop or a chicken or fish in sauce as well as any person. I know what I have undertaken, and if you think I will break down, you are mistaken, Ronald Lumsden, in me.”
“I am not mistaken in you, Lily. I know there is nothing you could not do if you were to try; but am I to be the one to make a drudge of my Lily—I that would like her to eat of the fat and drink of the sweet, as the ministers say, and have no trouble all her days?”
“It depends upon what you call trouble,” said Lily, still holding up her flag. “Trouble I suppose we shall have, sooner or later, or we’ll be more than mortal; but to serve you your dinner is what I would like to do. You’ll go out to the Parliament House and work to get the siller, for it must be allowed that between us we have not much of the siller, and you cannot buy either collops or chuckies without it, nor scarcely even a haddie or a herring out of the sea. But that’s the man’s share. And then I will buy it and clean it, and put it on in the pot, and you will eat of your wife’s cooking and your heart will be glad. Do you think I want to go back to George Square, or a fine house in one of the new Crescents, and sit with my hands before me? Not me, not me!”
“My bonnie Lily,” he cried, “it’s a bonnie dream, and like yourself, and if you only cooked a crust, it would be better than all the grand French kickshaws in the world or the English puddings to me.”
“You need not be so humble, sir,” said Lily; “I will cook no crust. It will be savory meat, such as thy soul loveth; though I’ll not cheat you as that designing woman Rebekah did.”