“I know the feeling,” said Aunt Ailie, “for I have shared it myself; and sometimes still it will come back to me, but in my better hours I think I'm wiser and can be content. If there is growth in you, you will grow anywhere. You were born in the noise of Chicago, Bud, and I suppose it's hard to get it out of the ears. By-and-by I hope you'll find that we are all of us most truly ourselves, not in the crowd, but when we are alone, and that not the smallest hamlet in the world need be intellectually narrow for any one with imagination, some books, and a cheerful constitution. Do you understand that, Bud?”
Bud thought hard for a moment and then shook her head. “It sounds as if it ought to be true,” said she, “and I dare say you think just now it is true; but I simply can't believe it.” And all of them turned at the sound of a chuckling laugh to find that Mr. Dyce had heard this frank confession.
“That's the worst of you, Bud,” said he. “You will never let older folk do your thinking for you.”
CHAPTER XXIX
IT is another mercy, too, that in our age we learn to make the best of what aforetime might be ill to thole, as Bell made fine new garments out of old ones faded by turning them outside in and adding frills and flounces. Bud's absence early ceased to be deplorable, since it wakened cheerful expectations not to be experienced had she stayed at home, gave rise to countless fond contrivances for her happiness in exile, and two or three times a year to periods of bliss, when her vacations gave the house of Dyce the very flower of ecstasy. Her weekly letters of themselves were almost compensation for her absence. On the days of their arrival Peter the post would come blithely whistling with his M.C. step to the lawyer's kitchen window before he went to the castle itself, defying all routine and the laws of the postmaster-general, for he knew Miss Dyce would be waiting feverishly, having likely dreamed the night before of happy things that—dreams going by contraries, as we all of us know in Scotland—might portend the most dreadful tidings.
Bud's envelope was always on the top of his budget. For the sake of it alone (it sometimes seemed to Peter and those who got it) had the mail come splashing through the night—the lawyer's big blue envelopes, as it were, had got but a friendly lift through the courtesy of clerks in Edinburgh, and the men on the railway train, and the lad who drove the gig from Maryfield. What were big blue envelopes of the business world compared with the modest little square of gray with Lennox Dyce's writing on it?
“Here's the usual! Pretty thick to-day!” would Peter say, with a smack of satisfaction on the window-sash. Ah, those happy Saturdays! Everybody knew about them. “And how's hersel'?” the bell-ringer would ask in the by-going, not altogether because his kindly interest led to an eye less strict on his lazy moods in the garden. One Fair day, when Maggie White's was irresistible, it rang so merrily with drovers, and he lost the place again, he stopped the lawyer on the street to ask him what Miss Lennox thought of all this argument about the Churches, seeing she was in the thick of it in Edinburgh.
“Never you mind the argument, Will,” said Daniel Dyce, “you do your duty by the auld kirk bell; and as for the Free folk's quarrelling, amang them be't!”