At that Miss Ailie lost her patience. She rose to go, with a start that sent the doves more widely fluttering than ever in their restless little parlour, so crowded out of all comfort by its fretful toys.
“I don’t think you should trouble much about the eradication,” she said with some of her brother’s manner at the bar. “Individuality is not painful to the possessor like toothache, so it’s a pity to eradicate it or kill the nerve.”
The words were out before she could prevent them; she bit her lips, and blushed in her vexation to have said them, but luckily the Pigeons in their agitation were not observant.
“Like all the Dyces, a little daft!” was what they said of her when she was gone, and they were very different women then, as they put on their aprons, rolled up the silver spoons in tissue-paper and put them in a stocking of Amelia’s, before they started to their crochet-work again.
It was a bright, expectant, happy bairn that set out next day for the school. No more momentous could have seemed her start for Scotland across the wide Atlantic; her aunties, looking after her going down the street alone, so confident and sturdily, rued their own arrangement, and envied the Misses Duff that were to be blessed all day with her companionship. To Bell it seemed as if the wean were walking out of their lives on that broad road that leads our bairns to other knowledge than ours, to other dwellings, to the stranger’s heart. Once the child turned at the corner of the church and waved her hand; Miss Ailie took it bravely, but oh, Miss Bell!—Miss Bell! she flew to the kitchen and stormed at Kate as she hung out at the window, an observer too.
Three-and-twenty scholars were there in the doo-cot of the Duffs—sixteen of them girls and the remainder boys, but not boys enough as yet to be in the Grammar School. Miss Jean came out and rang a tea-bell, and Bud was borne in on the tide of youth that was still all strange to her. The twins stood side by side behind a desk; noisily the children accustomed found their seats, but Bud walked up to the teachers and held out her hand.
“Good morning; I’m Lennox Dyce,” she said, before they could get over their astonishment at an introduction so unusual. Her voice, calm and clear, sounded to the backmost seat and sent the children tittering.
“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, reddening, with a glance at the delinquents, as she dubiously took the proffered hand.
“Rather a nice little school,” said Bud, “but a little stuffy. Wants air some, don’t it? What’s the name of the sweet little boy in the Fauntleroy suit? It looks as if it would be apt to be Percy.”
She was standing between the twins, facing the scholars; she surveyed all with the look of his Majesty’s Inspector.