He looked at her flushed face and her trembling hand and understood. “It's only the door of a house,” said he; “that makes no difference,” and ran the bolt into its staple.
CHAPTER XXVIII
FOR all the regrets of increasing age there is one alleviation among many, that days apart from those we love pass the quicker, even as our hurrying years. Thus it is that separations are divested of more and more of their terrors the nearer we are to that final parting which wipes out all and is but the going to a great reunion. So the first fortnight, whereof Miss Bell thought to cheat the almanac under the delusion that Bud's absence would then scarcely be appreciated, was in truth the period when she missed her most, and the girl was back for her Christmas holidays before half of her threepenny bits for the plate were done.
It was worth a year of separation to see her come in at the door, rosy from the frosty air, with sparkling eyes and the old, sweet, rippling laugh, not—outside at least—an atom different from the girl who had gone away; and it made up to Bud herself for many evenings homesick on an Edinburgh pillow to smell again the old celestial Christmas grocery and feel the warmth of her welcome.
Myself, I like to be important—not of such consequence to the world as to have it crick its neck with having to look up at me, but now and then important only to a few old friends; and Bud, likewise, could always enjoy the upper seat, if the others of her company were never below the salt. She basked in the flattery that Kate's deportment gave to her dignity as a young lady educated at tremendous cost.
It was the daft days of her first coming over again; but this time she saw all with older eyes—and, besides, the novelty of the little Scottish town was ended. Wanton Wully's bell, pealing far beyond the burgh bounds—commanding, like the very voice of God, to every ear of that community, no matter whether it rang at mom or eve—gave her at once a crystal notion of the smallness of the place, not only in its bounds of stone and mortar, but in its interests, as compared with the city, where a thousand bells, canorous on the Sabbath, failed, it was said, to reach the ears of more than a fraction of the people. The bell, and John Taggart's band on hogmanay, and the little shops with windows falling back already on timid appeals, and the gray, high tenements pierced by narrow entries, and the douce and decent humdrum folk—she saw them with a more exacting vision, and Ailie laughed to hear them all summed up as “quaint.”
“I wondered when you would reach 'quaint,'” said Auntie Ailie; “it was due some time ago, but this is a house where you never hear the word. Had you remained at the Pige—at the Misses Duff's Seminary, Miss Amelia would have had you sewing it on samplers, if samplers any longer were the fashion.”
“Is it not a nice word, 'quaint'?” asked Bud, who, in four months among critics less tolerant (and perhaps less wise) than the Dyces, had been compelled to rid herself of many transatlantic terms and phrases.