SUDDENLY all the town began to talk of the pride of Kate MacNeill. She took to wearing all her best on week-days, abandoned the kitchen window, and ruined an old-established trade in pay-night sweeties that used to shower on her in threepenny packets at the start of every autumn when the days grew short. No longer blate young lads scraped with their feet uneasily in the sawdust of P. & A. Mac-Glashan's, swithering between the genteel attractions of Turkish Delight and the eloquence of conversation lozenges that saved a lot of thinking and made the blatest equal with the boldest when it came to tender badinage below the lamp at the back-door close with Dyce's maid. Talk about the repartee of salons! wit moves deliberately there compared with the swift giff-gaff that Kate and her lads were used to maintain with sentiments doubly sweet and ready-made at threepence the quarter pound. So fast the sweeties passed, like the thrust and riposte of rapiers, that their final purpose was forgotten; they were sweeties no longer to be eaten, but scented billets-doux, laconic of course, but otherwise just as satisfactory as those that high-born maidens get only one at a time and at long intervals when their papas are out at business.
“Are you engaged?”
“Just keep spierin'.”
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“You are a gay deceiver.”
“My heart is yours.”
“How are your poor feet?”
By the hour could Kate sustain such sparkling flirtations, or at least till a “Kiss me, dearest” turned up from the bottom of the poke, and then she slapped his face for him. It is the only answer out in Colonsay unless he's your intended.
But it stopped all at once. P. & A. was beat to understand what way his pay-night drawings fell, until he saw that all the lads were taking the other side of the street. “That's her off, anyway!” said he to Mrs. P. & A., with a gloomy visage. “I wonder who's the lucky man? It's maybe Peter—she'll no' get mony lozengers from him.”
And it was not only the decline in votive offerings that showed the vital change: she was not at the Masons' ball, which shows how wrong was the thought of P. & A., for Peter was there with another lady. Very cheery, too, exceedingly cheery, ah, desperately gay, but quite beyond the comprehension of his partner, Jenny Shand, who was unable to fathom why a spirit so merry in the hall should turn to groans and bitterness when, feeling a faintish turn, she got him in behind the draught-screen on the landing of the stair to sit the “Flowers o' Edinburgh.” He was fidging fain to tell her plainly what he thought of all her sex, but strove like a perfect gentleman against the inclination, and only said, “Ha! ha! do you say so, noo?” and “Weemen!” with a voice that made them all out nothing more nor less than vipers. Poor Jenny Shand! bonny Jenny Shand! what a shame she should be bothered with so ill-faured a fellow! When she was picking bits of nothing off his coat lapel, as if he was her married man, and then coming to herself with a pretty start and begging pardon for her liberty, the diffy paid no heed; his mind was down the town, and he was seeing himself yesterday morning at the first delivery getting the window of Dyce's kitchen banged in his face when he started to talk about soap, meaning to work the topic round to hands and gloves. He had got the length of dirty hands, and asked the size of hers, when bang! the window went, and the Hielan' one in among her pots and pans.