CHAPTER XII.
She was wayward, she was passionate, she was sometimes wild. She was not what, in the Pigeons’ Seminary, could be called a good child, for all her sins were frankly manifest, and she knew no fear nor naughty stratagem; her mind, to all but Kate, was open as the day, and there it was the fault of honest Kate’s stupidity. But often Miss Bell must be moaning at transgressions almost harmless in themselves, yet so terribly unlike a Christian bairn, as when Bud spent an afternoon in a tent with some gipsy children, changed clothes with them the better to act a part, and stormed because she could not have them in to tea with her. Or when she asked Lady Anne, bazaar-collecting in the house of Dyce, if she ever had had a proposal. It was a mercy that Lady Anne that very week had had one, and was only too pleased to tell of it and say she had accepted.
“Then you’re safe out of the woods,” said Bud gravely. “There’s our Kate, she hasn’t had a proposal yet, and I guess she’s on the slopey side of thirty. It must be dre’ffle to be as old—as old as a house and have no beau to love you. It must be ’scrutiating.”
Lady Anne let her eyes turn for a moment on the sisters Dyce, and the child observed and reddened.
“Oh! Auntie Bell!” she said quickly. “Auntie Bell had heaps and heaps of beaux all dying to marry her, but she gave them the calm cold eye and said she had to cling to Uncle Dan. It was very noble of her, wasn’t it?”
“Indeed it was!” admitted Lady Anne, very much ashamed of herself.
“And Auntie Ailie is not on the slopey side of thirty,” continued Bud, determined to make all amends. “She’s young enough to love dolls.”
It was Bell who censured her for this dreadful behaviour. “You are a perfect torment, Lennox,” she said, at the first opportunity. “A bairn like you must not be talking about beaux, and love, and proposals, and nonsense of that kind,—it’s fair ridiculous.”
“Why, I thought love was the Great Thing!” exclaimed Bud, much astonished. “It’s in all the books, there’s hardly anything else, ’cept when somebody is murdered and you know that the man who did it is the only one you don’t suspect. Indeed, Auntie, I thought it was the Great Thing!”
“And so it is, my dear,” said Ailie. “There’s very little else in all the world, except—except the children,” and she folded her niece in her arms. “It is the Great Thing; it has made Lady Anne prettier than ever she was in her life before, it has made her brighter, humbler, gentler, kinder. God bless her, I hope she will be happy.”