“I wish you had never thought of it,” said Miss Jean, with a sigh and a vicious little shake of the reticule. “I am not blaming you, remember, 'Melia; if we are doing wrong the blame of it is equally between us, except perhaps a little more for me, for I did think the big one was better value for the money. And yet it made me grue, it looked so—so dastardly.”
“Jean,” said her sister, solemnly, “if you had taken the big one I would have marched out of the shop affronted. If it made you grue, it made me shudder. Even with the small one, did you notice how the man looked at us? I thought he felt ashamed to be selling such a thing; perhaps he has a family. He said they were not very often asked for. I assure you I felt very small, the way he said it.”
Once more they bent their douce-brown hats together over the reticule and looked timidly in on the object of their shames and fears. “Well, there it is, and it can't be helped,” said Miss Jean at last, despairingly. “Let us hope and trust there will not be too frequent need for it, for, I assure you, I have neither the strength nor inclination.” She snapped the bag shut again, and, glancing up, saw the man with the fur collar looking over his shoulder at them.
“Strikes me, ladies,” he said, “the stage-coach, as an easy mark for the highwaymen who used to permeate these parts, must have been a pretty merry proposition; they'd be apt to stub their toes on it if they came sauntering up behind. John here”—with an inclination of his head towards the driver—“tells me he's on schedule time, and I allow he's making plenty fuss clicking his palate, but I feel I want to get out and heave rocks at his cattle so's they'd get a better gait on 'em.”
Miss Jean was incapable of utterance; she was still too much afraid of a stranger who, though gallantly helping them to the top of the coach at Maryfield, could casually address herself and Miss Amelia as “dears,” thrust cigars on the guard and driver, and call them John and George at the very first encounter.
“We—we think this is fairly fast,” Miss Amelia ventured, surprised at her own temerity. “It's nineteen miles in two hours, and if it's not so fast as a railway train it lets you enjoy the scenery. It is very much admired, our scenery, it's so—it's so characteristic.”
“Sure!” said the stranger, “it's pretty tidy scenery as scenery goes, and scenery's my forte. But I'd have thought that John here'd have all this part of Caledonia stem and wild so much by heart he'd want to rush it and get to where the houses are; but most the time his horses go so slow they step on their own feet at every stride.”
“Possibly the coach is a novelty to you,” suggested Miss Amelia, made wondrous brave by two weeks' wild adventuring in Edinburgh. “I—I take you for an American.”
“So did my wife, and she knew, for she belonged out mother's place,” said the stranger, laughing. “You've guessed right, first time. No, the coach is no novelty to me; I've been up against a few in various places. If I'm short of patience and want more go just at present, it's because I'm full of a good joke on an old friend I'm going to meet at the end of these obsequies.”
“Obsequies?” repeated Miss Amelia, with surprise, and he laughed again.