“Oh my!” she said bravely, “here I’m talking away to you about myself, and I’m no more account than a rabbit under these present circumstances, Captain Charles, and all the time you’re just pining to know all about your Kate.”
The Captain tugged his beard and reddened again. “A fine, fine gyurl!” said he. “I hope—I hope she’s pretty well.”
“She’s fine,” said Bud, nodding her head gravely. “You bet Kate can walk now without taking hold. Why, there’s never anything wrong with her ’cepting now and then the croodles, and they’re not anything lingering.”
“There was a kind of a rumour that she was at times a trifle delicate,” said Charles. “In fact, it was herself who told me, in her letters.”
Bud blushed. This was one of the few details of her correspondence on which she and Kate had differed. It had been her idea that an invalidish hint at intervals produced a nice and tender solicitude in the roving sailor, and she had, at times, credited the maid with some of Mrs Molyneux’s old complaints, a little modified and more romantic, though Kate herself maintained that illness in a woman under eighty was looked upon as anything but natural or interesting in Colonsay.
“It was nothing but—but love,” she said now, confronted with the consequence of her imaginative cunning. “You know what love is, Captain Charles? A powerfully weakening thing, though I don’t think it would hurt anybody if they wouldn’t take it so much to heart.”
“I’m glad to hear it’s only—only what you mention,” said Charles, much relieved. “I thought it might be something inward, and that maybe she was working too hard at her education.”
“Oh, she’s not taking her education so bad as all that,” Bud assured him. “She isn’t wasting to a shadow sitting up nights with a wet towel on her head soaking in the poets and figuring sums. All she wanted was to be sort of middling smart, but nothing gaudy.”
Captain Charles looked sideway keenly at the child as she sat beside him, half afraid himself of the irony he had experienced among her countrymen, but saw it was not here. Indeed it never was in Lennox Dyce, for all her days she had the sweet engaging self-unconsciousness no training can command; frankness, fearlessness, and respect for all her fellows—the gifts that will never fail to make the proper friends. She talked so composedly that he was compelled to frankness himself on a subject no money could have made him speak about to any one a week ago.
“Between you and me and the mast,” said he, “I’m feared Kate has got far too clever for the like of me, and that’s the way I have not called on her.”