Peggy dried her arms, tucked up the corner of her apron, and departed, fully aware of the stratagem, but no way betraying the fact When she was gone, Miss Mary faced him, disturbed and questioning.
“We had a quarrel in there,” said he shortly, “I am not going to put up with what they said about any friend of mine.”
She had no need to ask who he spoke of. “Is it very much to you?” said she, turning away and busy with her brush that she might be no spectator of his confusion. A great fear sprang up in her; the boy who had grown up a man for her in the space of a Sunday afternoon was capable of new developments even more rapid and extraordinary.
“It should be very much to anybody,” said he, “to anybody with the spark of a gentleman, when the old and the soured and the jealous——”
“I’m thinking you are forgetting, Gilian,” said she, facing him now with a flush upon her face.
“What? what?” he asked, perplexed. “You think I should be grateful. I cannot help it; you were the kind one and——”
“I was not thinking of that at all,” she rejoined “I was just thinking you had forgotten that I was their sister, and that I must be caring much for them. If my brothers have said anything to vex you, and that has been a too common thing—my sorrow!—in this house, you should be minding their years, my dear. It is the only excuse I can offer, and I am willing to make up for their shortcomings by every kindness.” And she smiled upon the lad with the most wonderful light of affection in her eyes.
“Oh,” he cried, “am I not sure of that, Auntie? You are too good to me. What am I to be complaining—the beggarly orphan?”
“Not that, my dear,” she cried courageously, “not that! In this house, when my brothers’ looks were at their blackest for you, there has always been goodwill and motherliness. But you must not be miscalling them that share our roof, the brothers of Dugald and of Jamie.” Her voice broke in a gasp of melancholy; she stretched an arm and dusted from a corner of the kitchen a cobweb that had no existence, her eyesight dim with unbrimming tears. At any other time than now Gilian would have been smitten by her grief, for was he not ever ready to make the sorrows of others his own? But he was frowning in a black-browed abstraction on the clay scroll of the kitchen floor, heartsick of his dilemma and the bitterness of the speeches he had just heard.
Miss Mary could not be long without observing, even in her own troubles, that he was unusually vexed. She was wise enough to know that a fresh start was the best thing to put them at an understanding.