“Didn’t you know me, Aunt Ailie?” asked Bud.
“Not in the least,” said Ailie, taking the droll old figure in her arms. “Perhaps I might have known you if I didn’t think it was to-morrow you were coming.”
“It was to have been to-morrow; but the measles have broken out in school, and I came a day earlier, and calculated I’d just hop in and surprise you all. Didn’t you guess, Uncle Dan?”
“Not at first,” said he. “I’ll admit I was fairly deceived, but when you talked about being in the Band of Hope I saw at a shot through The Macintosh. I hope you liked my Latin, Bud.”
CHAPTER XXX.
“You surely did not come in these daft-like garments all the way from Edinburgh?” asked her Auntie Bell, when the wig had been removed and Bud’s youth was otherwise resumed.
“Not at all!” said Bud, sparkling with the success of her deception. “I came almost enough of a finished young lady to do you credit, but when I found there was nobody in the house except Kate, I felt I couldn’t get a better chance to introduce you to The Macintosh if I waited for a year. I told you we’d been playing charades last winter at the school, and I got Jim to send me some make-up, the wig, and this real ’cute old lady’s dress. They were all in my box to give you some fun sometime, and Kate helped me hook things, though she was mighty scared to think how angry you might be, Aunt Bell; and when I was ready for you she said she’d be sure to laugh fit to burst, and then you’d see it was only me dressed up, and Footles he barked, so he looked like giving the show away, so I sent them both out into the garden and sat in a stage-fright that almost shook my ear-rings off. I tell you I felt mighty poorly sitting there wondering what on earth I was to say; but by-and-by I got to be so much The Macintosh I felt almost sure enough her to have the rheumatism, and knew I could fix up gags to keep the part going. I didn’t expect Uncle Dan would be the first to come in, or I wouldn’t have felt so brave about it, he’s so sharp and suspicious—that’s with being a lawyer, I s’pose, they’re a’ tarred wi’ the ae stick, Miss Macintosh says; and when he talked all that solemn Latin stuff and looked like running up a bill for law advice that would ruin me, I laughed inside enough to ache. Now amn’t I just the very wickedest girl, Uncle Dan?”
“A little less Scotch and a more plausible story would have made the character perfect,” said her uncle. “Where did you get them both? Miss Macintosh was surely not the only model?”
“Well, she’s not so Scotch as I made out, except when she’s very sentimental, but I felt she’d have to be as Scotch as the mountain and the flood to fit these clothes; and she’s never talked about marrying anybody herself, but she’s making a match just now for a cousin of hers, and tells us all about it. I was partly her, but not enough to be unkind or mean, and partly her cousin, and a little bit of the Waverley Novels,—in fact, I was pure mosaic, like our dog. There wasn’t enough real quaint about Miss Macintosh for ordinary to make a front scene monologue go, but she’s fuller of hints than—than a dictionary, and once I started I felt I could play half a dozen Macintoshes all different, so’s you’d actually think she was a surging crowd. You see there’s the Jacobite Macintosh, and the ‘aboaminable’ English Macintosh, and the flirting Macintosh who raps Herr Laurent with her fan, and the fortune-telling Macintosh who reads palms and tea-cup leaves, and the dancing and deportment Macintosh who knows all the first families in Scotland.”
Bud solemnly counted off the various Macintoshes on her finger-tips.