He was humming “Star of Peace”—for the tune he started the morning with usually lasted him all day,—and standing in the middle of the floor contemplating with amusement the ladylike adornment of the room prepared for his Chicago nephew, when a light step fell on the attic stairs, and a woman’s voice cried, “Dan! Dan Dyce! Coo-ee!”
He did not answer.
She cried again after coming up a step or two more, but still he did not answer. He slid behind one of the bed-curtains.
CHAPTER II.
Alison Dyce came lightly up the rest of the stair, whistling blithely, in spite of her sister Bell’s old notion that whistling women and crowing hens are never canny. She swept into the room. People in the town—which has a forest of wood and deer behind it—used to say she had the tread and carriage of a young wild roe, and I can well assure you she was the girl to walk with on a winter day! She had in her hand a book of poems called ‘The Golden Treasury’ and a spray of the herb called Honesty, that thrives in poor men’s gardens. Having laid them down on the table without noticing her brother’s extraordinary Present for a Good Boy, she turned about and fondled things. She smoothed the bed-clothes as if they covered a child, she patted the chair-backs with an air of benediction, she took cushions to her breast like one that cuddled them, and when she touched the mantel-piece ornaments they could not help it but must start to chime. It was always a joy to see Alison Dyce redding-up, as we say; though in housewifery, like sewing, knitting, and cooking, she was only a poor second to her sister Bell. She tried, from duty, to like these occupations, but, oh dear! the task was beyond her: whatever she had learned from her schooling in Edinburgh and Brussels, it was not the darning of hose and the covering of rhubarb-tarts.
Her gift, said Bell, was management.
Tripping round the little attic, she came back by-and-by to the table at the window to take one last wee glimpse inside ‘The Golden Treasury,’ that was her own delight and her notion of happy half-hours for the ideal boy, and her eye fell for the first time on the pea-sling and the note beside it.
She read, and laughed, and upon my word, if laughter like Ailie Dyce’s could be bought in perforated rolls, there would be no demand for Chopin and Schumann on the pianolas. It was a laugh that even her brother could not resist: a paroxysm of coughing burst from behind the curtains, and he came out beside her chuckling.
“I reckoned without my hoast,” said he, gasping.
“I was sure you were upstairs,” said Alison. “You silly man! Upon my word! Where’s your dignity, Mr Dyce?”