“Was I not sure of it!” cried Kate, triumphant; but that was not the end of the ceremony, for she was bidden to sip a little from the glass, without swallowing, and go dumb into the night till she heard the Christian name of a man, and that was the name of the sailor husband. Kate sipped from the glass of destiny, and passed with Bud into the darkness of the lane. It was then there came to the child the delicious, wild eerieness that she was beginning now to coax to her spirit whenever she could, and feed her fancies on. The light of the lantern only wanly illumined the lane they hurried through; so plain and gray and ancient and dead looked the houses pressing on either hand, with windows shuttered, that it seemed to Bud she had come by magic on a shell as empty of life as the armor in the castle hall. By-and-by the servant, speechless, stopped at a corner listening. No sound of human life for a moment, but then a murmur of voices up the town, to which on an impulse she started running, with Lennox at her heels, less quickly since the light of her lantern must be nursed from the wind. Bud fell behind in the race for the voice of fate; the sound of the footsteps before her died away in the distance, and her light went out, and there she stood alone for the first time in the dark of Scotland—Scotland where witches still wrought spells! A terror that was sweet to think of in the morning, whose memory she cherished all her days, seized on her, and she knew that all the ballad book was true! One cry she gave, that sounded shrilly up the street—it was the name of Charles, and Kate, hearing it, gulped and came back.
“I guessed that would fetch you,” said Bud, panting. “I was so scared I had to say it, though I s'pose it means I've lost him for a husband.”
“My stars! you are the clever one!” said the grateful maid.
CHAPTER XIX
SPRING came, and its quickening; forest and shrub and flower felt the new sap rise; she grew in the garden then, the child—in that old Scottish garden, sheltered lownly in the neuk of the burgh walls. It must have been because the Dyces loved so much their garden, and spent so many hours there, that they were so sanely merry, nor let too often or too long the Scots' forebodings quell their spirits, but got lessons of hope from the circling of the seasons, that give us beauty and decay in an unvarying alternation.
“It is the time,” used Ailie to say of the spring, “when a delicious feeling steals over you of wanting to sit down and watch other people work.”
“I'll need to have the lawn-mower sharpened; it may be needed at any moment by the neighbors,” said her brother Dan.
They watched upspring the green spears of the daffodils, that by-and-by should bear their flags of gold.