“Tuts! woman,” he said to her, lifting the basket and putting it in her hand. “Why need you bother with the like of that? You and your curtseys! They’re out of date, Miss Baxter, out of date, like the decent men that deserved them long ago before my time.”
“No, they’re not out of date, Mr Dyce,” said she; “I’ll aye be minding you about my mother; you’ll be paid back some day.”
“Tuts!” said he again, impatient. “You’re an awful blether: how’s your patient, Duncan Gill?”
“As dour as the devil, sir,” said the nurse. “Still hanging on.”
“Poor man! poor man!” said Mr Dyce. “He’ll just have to put his trust in God.”
“Oh, he’s no’ so far through as all that,” said Betty Baxter. “He can still sit up and take his drop of porridge. They’re telling me you have got a wonderful niece, Mr Dyce, all the way from America. What a mercy for her! But I have not set eyes on her yet. I’m so busy that I could not stand in the close like the others, watching: what is she like?”
“Just like Jean Macrae,” said Mr Dyce, preparing to move on.
“And what was Jean Macrae like?”
“Oh, just like other folk,” said Mr Dyce, and passed on chuckling, to run almost into the arms of Captain Consequence.
“Have you heard the latest?” said Captain Consequence, putting his kid-gloved hand on the shoulder of the lawyer, who felt it like a lump of ice, for he did not greatly like the man, the smell of whose cigars, he said, before he knew they came from the Pilgrim Widow’s, proved that he rose from the ranks.