“Hot air,” said Bud promptly.
“Good!” said Dan Dyce, rubbing his hands together. “What I’m saying may seem just hot air to you, but it’s meant. You do not know the Shorter Catechism; never mind; there’s a lot of it I’m afraid I do not know myself; but the whole of it is in that first answer to Man’s Chief End. Reading and writing, and all the rest of it, are of less importance, but I’ll not deny they’re gey and handy. You’re no Dyce if you don’t master them easily enough.”
He kissed her and got gaily up and turned to go. “Now,” said he, “for the law, seeing we’re done with the gospels. I’m a conveyancing lawyer—though you’ll not know what that means—so mind me in your prayers.”
Bell went out into the lobby after him, leaving Bud in a curious frame of mind, for Man’s Chief End, and Bruce’s spider, and the word “joco,” all tumbled about in her, demanding mastery.
“Little help I got from you, Dan!” said Bell to her brother. “You never even tried her with a multiplication table.”
“What’s seven times nine?” he asked her, with his fingers on the handle of the outer door, his eyes mockingly mischievous.
She flushed, and laughed, and pushed him on the shoulder. “Go away with you!” said she. “Fine you ken I could never mind seven times!”
“No Dyce ever could,” said he,—“excepting Ailie. Get her to put the little creature through her tests. If she’s not able to spell cat at ten she’ll be an astounding woman by the time she’s twenty.”
The end of it was that Aunt Ailie, whenever she came in, upon Bell’s report, went over the street to Rodger’s shop and made a purchase. As she hurried back with it, bare-headed, in a cool drizzle of rain that jewelled her wonderful hair, she felt like a child herself again. The banker-man saw her from his lodging as she flew across the street with sparkling eyes and eager lips, the roses on her cheeks, and was sure, foolish man! that she had been for a new novel or maybe a cosmetique, since in Rodger’s shop they sell books and balms and ointments. She made the quiet street magnificent for a second—a poor wee second, and then, for him, the sun went down. The tap of the knocker on the door she closed behind her struck him on the heart. You may guess, good women, if you like, that at the end of the book the banker-man is to marry Ailie, but you’ll be wrong; she was not thinking of the man at all at all—she had more to do; she was hurrying to open the gate of gold to her little niece.
“I’ve brought you something wonderful,” said she to the child—“better than dolls, better than my cloak, better than everything; guess what it is.”