“The wickedness of him; such a lot of lies!”
“Pooh!” said Bud. “He was only for the effect. Of course there never really was such a mean, wicked man as that Iago—there couldn't be—but Shakespeare made him just so's you'd like the nice folk all the more by thinking what they might have been if God had let Himself go.”
That night Kate was abed by eight. Vainly the town cried for her—the cheerful passage of feet on the pavement, and a tinkler piper at the Cross, and she knew how bright was the street, with the late-lit windows of the shops, and how intoxicating was the atmosphere of Saturday in the dark, but having said her Lord's Prayer in Gaelic, and “Now I lay me down to sleep” in English, she covered her head with the blankets and thought of the coming day with joy and apprehension, until she fell asleep.
In the morning Miss Bell had no sooner gone up to the making of beds, that was her Sabbath care to save the servant-maid from too much sin, and Ailie to her weekly reading with the invalid Duncan Gill, than Bud flew into the kitchen to make Kate ready for her tryst. Never in this world were breakfast dishes sooner cleaned and dried than by that eager pair; no sooner were they done than Kate had her chest-lid up, and had dived, head foremost, among her Sunday finery.
“What's that?” asked Bud. “You're not going to put on glad rags, are you?” For out there came a blue gown, fondled tenderly.
“Of course I am,” said Kate. “It's either that or my print for it, and a print wrapper would not be the thing at all to meet—meet the Captain in; he'll be expecting me to be truly refined.”
“I think he'd like the wrapper better,” said Bud, gravely. “The blue gown's very nice—but it's not Kate, somehow; do you know, I think it's Auntie Ailie up to about the waist, and the banker's cook in the lacey bits above that, and it don't make you refined a bit. It's not what you put on that makes you refined, it's things you can't take off. You have no idea how sweet you look in that print, Kate, with your cap and apron. You look better in them than if you wore the latest yell of fashion. I'd want to marry you myself if I was a captain and saw you dressed like that; but if you had on your Sunday gown I'd—I'd bite my lip and go home and ask advice from mother.”
Kate put past the blue gown, not very willingly, but she had learned by now that in some things Bud had better judgment than herself. She washed and dried her face till it shone like a polished apple, put on Bud's choice of a cap and streamered apron, and was about to take a generous dash of Florida Water when she found her hand restrained.
“I'd have no scent,” said Bud. “I like scent myself, some, and I just dote on our Florida Water, but Auntie Ailie says the scent of clean water, sun, and air, is the sweetest a body can have about one, and any other kind's as rude as Keating's Powder.”
“He'll be expecting the Florida Water,” said Kate, “seeing that it was himself that sent it.”