“We’re not needing curtains,” said Miss Bell hurriedly; “the pair we have are fine.”
Dan finished his breakfast that day with a smile, flicked the crumbs off his waistcoat, gave one uneasy glance at Ailie, and went off to business humming “There is a Happy Land.”
“Oh, dear me, I’m afraid he’s growing a perfect miser,” moaned Bell when she heard the door close behind him. “He did not use to be like that when he was younger and poorer. Money’s like the toothache, a commanding thing.”
Ailie smiled. “If you went about as much as I do, Bell,” she said, “you would not be misled by Dan’s pretences. And as for Black the baker, I saw his wife in Miss Minto’s yesterday buying boots for her children and a bonnet for herself. She called me Miss Ailie, an honour I never got from her in all my life before.”
“Do you think—do you think he gave Black the money?” said Bell in a pleasant excitation.
“Of course he did. It’s Dan’s way to give it to some folk with a pretence of reluctance, for if he did not growl they would never be off his face! He’s telling us about the lecture that accompanied it as a solace to our femininity. Women, you know, are very bad lenders, and dislike the practice in their husbands and brothers.”
“None of the women I know,” protested Bell. “They’re just as free-handed as the men if they had it. I hope,” she added anxiously, “that Dan got good security. Would it be a dear bonnet, now, that she was getting?”
Ailie laughed,—a ridiculous sort of sister this; she only laughed.
Six times each lawful day Daniel Dyce went up and down the street between his house and the office at the windy corner opposite the Cross, the business day being divided by an interval of four hours to suit the mails. The town folk liked to see him passing; he gave the street an air of occupation and gaiety, as if a trip had just come in with a brass band banging at the latest air. Going or coming, he was apt to be humming a tune to himself as he went along with his hands in his outside pockets, and it was an unusual day when he did not stop to look in at a shop window or two on the way, though they never changed a feature once a-month. To the shops he honoured thus it was almost as good as a big turnover. Before him his dog went whirling and barking, a long alarm for the clerks to stop their game of Catch-the-Ten and dip their pens. There were few that passed him without some words of recognition.
He was coming down from the office on the afternoon of the Han’sel Monday that started Bud in the Pigeons’ Seminary when he met the nurse, old Betty Baxter, with a basket. She put it down at her feet, and bobbed a curtsey, a thing that nowadays you rarely see in Scotland.