“Pains,” moaned the maid. “Pains inside me and all over me, and shiverings down the spine of the back. Oh, it's a sore thing pain, especially when it's bad! But don't—don't say a word to the mustress; I'm not that old, and maybe I'll get better.”
“Try pain-killer,” recommended Bud. “And if I was you I'd start just here and say a prayer. Butt right in and I'll not listen.”
“Pain-killer!—what in all the world's pain-killer? I never heard of it. And the only prayer I know is 'My Father which art' in Gaelic, and there's nothing in it about pains in the spine of the back. No, no! I'll just have to take a table-spoonful of something or other three times a day, the way I did when the doctor put me right in Colonsay. Perhaps it's just a chill, but oh! I'm sorrowful, sorrowful!” and Kate, the color coming slowly back to her, wept softly to herself, rocking in the kitchen chair. It was sometimes by those odd hysterics that she paid for her elations with the lads.
“I know what's wrong with you,” said Bud, briskly, in the manner of Mrs. Molyneux. “It's just the croodles. Bless you, you poor, perishing soul! I take the croodles myself when it's a night like this and I'm alone. The croodles ain't the least wee bit deadly; you can put them away by hustling at your work, or banging an old piano, or reading a story, or playing that you're somebody else—Well, I declare, I think I could cure you right now with these twelve candles, far better than you'd do by shooting drugs into yourself.”
“I never took a single candle in all my life,” said Kate, “far less twelve, and I'll die first.”
“Silly!” exclaimed Bud. “You'd think to hear you speak you were a starving Esquimau. I don't want you to eat the candles. Wait a minute.” She ran lightly up-stairs and was gone for ten minutes.
Kate's color all revived; she forgot her croodles in the spirit of anticipation that the child had roused. “Oh, but she's the clever one that!” she said to herself, drying the rain and tears from her face and starting to nibble a biscuit. “She knows as much as two ministers, and still she's not a bit proud. Some day she'll do something desperate.”
When Bud came back she startled the maid by her appearance, for she had clad herself, for the first time in Scotland, with a long, thin, copious dancing-gown, in which a lady of the vaudeville, a friend of Mrs. Molyneux's, had taught her dancing.
“Ain't this dandy?” she said, closing the kitchen door, and there was a glow upon her countenance and a movement of her body that, to the maid's eyes, made her look a little woman. “Ain't this bully? Don't you stand there looking like a dying Welsh rabbit, but help me light them candles for the foot-lights. Why, I knew there was some use for these old candles first time I set eyes on them; they made me think of something I couldn't 'zactly think of—made me kind of gay, you know, just as if I was going to the theatre. They're only candles, but there's twelve lights to them all at once, and now you'll see some fun.”
“What in the world are you going to do, lassie?” asked the maid.