“Yes,” said Lady Anne; “she has recommended a man who seems in all respects quite suitable, if he happens to know a little about sailing, and I'm going to write to him to come and see me.”
At that, I must confess it, Lennox for once forgot her manners and darted from the parlor to tell Kate the glorious news.
“Kate, you randy!” she cried, bursting into the kitchen, “I've fixed it up for Charles; he's to be the captain.”
The servant danced on the floor in a speechless transport, and Bud danced, too.
CHAPTER XXI
TOO slow, far too slow, passed the lengthening days. Kate was bedded by nine to make them shorter by an hour or two, but what she took from the foot of the day she tacked to the head of it, as Paddy in the story eked his blanket, and she was up in the mornings long before Wanton Wully rang the six-hours' bell. The elder Dyces—saving Ailie, who knew all about it, hearing it from Bud in passionate whispers as they lay together in one bed in the brightening moms of May—might think summer's coming was what made the household glad, Kate sing like the laverock, and Lennox so happy and so good, but it was the thought of Charles. “You've surely taken a desperate fancy for Prince Charlie songs,” said Miss Bell to Bud and the maid of Colonsay. “Is there not another ditty in the ballant?” and they would glance at each other guiltily, but never let on.
“Come o'er the stream, Charlie, dear Charlie, brave Charlie, Come o'er the stream, Charlie, and I'll be Maclean.”
Bud composed that one in a jiffy, sitting one day at the kitchen window, and of all the noble Jacobite measures Kate liked it best, “it was so clever, and so desperate like the thing!” Such a daft disease is love! To the woman whose recollection of the mariner was got from olden Sabbath walks 'tween churches in the windy isle, among the mossy tombs, and to Bud, who had never seen him, but had made for herself a portrait blent of the youth so gay and gallant Kate described, and of George Sibley Purser, and of dark, ear-ringed men of the sea that in “The Tempest” cry, “Heigh, my hearts! cheerily, cheerily, cheerily, my hearts! yare, yare,” the prospect of his presence was a giddy joy.