“Johnny, do you mean that you have sent up other things like this, and got no good of them?”
“Aye,” he said, without looking up. He was not a cheerful figure, with his head bent on his breast, and his eyes fixed on the strange prize—was it a mere clammy inanimate thing, or was it progress, and fame, and fortune?—which lay at his feet. Elsie did not know what to say.
“And you standing there with wet feet, and everything damp and cold about you,” she cried, with a sudden outburst. “Go home this moment, Johnny Wemyss; this time it will be different. I’m not a prophet and how should I know? But this time it will be different. How are you to get it home?”
He took his blue bonnet from his head, with a low laugh, and placed the specimen in it.
“Nobody minds,” he said, smoothing down his sleeves. “I am as often without my bonnet as with it. They say it’s only Johnny Wemyss: but I’m not fit to walk by the side of a bonnie princess like you.”
“I am coming with you all the same,” Elsie said.
They were, indeed, a very unlikely pair. The girl in all her prettiness of summer costume, the young man, damp, sandy, and bareheaded, carrying his treasure. So far as the sands extended, however, there was no one to mark the curious conjunction, and they went lightly over the firm wet sand within high-water mark, talking little, but with a perfect familiarity and kindness of companionship which was more exquisite than the heats and chills through which Frank Mowbray had passed, when Elsie for her own purposes had led him back. Elsie kept step with Johnny’s large tread, she had an air of belonging to him which came from the intimate intercourse of years; and though the social distinction between the minister’s daughter and the fisherman’s son was very marked, externally, it was evidently quite blotted out in fact by a closer fraternity. Elsie was not ashamed of him, nor was Johnny proud of her, so far as their difference of position was concerned. He was proud of her in another sense, but she quite as much of him.
“I will call it ‘Princess Elsie,’” he said at last. “I will put it in Latin: or else I will call it ‘Alicia:’ for Elsie and Alison and all are from Alice, which is just the bonniest name in the world.”
“Nonsense,” she said, “there are many that are much bonnier. I don’t think Alison is very bonny, it is old-fashioned; but it was my grandmother’s name, and I like it for that.”
“It is just the bonniest name in all the world,” he repeated, softly; but next moment they had climbed from the sands to the smooth ground near the old castle, and from thenceforward Johnny Wemyss was the centre of a moving group, made up of boys and girls, and an occasional golfer, and a fisher or two, and, in short, everybody about; for Johnny Wemyss was known to everybody, and his particular pursuits were the sport, and interest, and pride of the town.