“Yes; at least it’ll do fine,” said the maid, with that Highland politeness that is often so bad for business. “There’s not much about himself in it, but och! it’ll do fine. It’s as nice a letter as ever I saw: the lines are all that straight.”
“But there’s blots,” said Bud regretfully. “There oughtn’t to be blots in a real love-letter.”
“Toots! just put a cross beside each of them, and write ‘this is a kiss,’” said Kate, who must have had some previous experience. “You forgot to ask him how’s his health, as it leaves us at present.”
So Bud completed the letter as instructed. “Now for the envelope,” said she.
“I’ll put the address on it myself,” said Kate, confused. “He would be sure somebody else had been reading it if the address was not in my hand of write,”—an odd excuse, whose absurdity escaped the child. So the maid put the letter in the bosom of her Sunday gown against her heart, where meanwhile dwelt the only Charles. It is, I sometimes think, where we should all deposit and retain our love-letters; for the lad and lass, as we must think of them, have no existence any more than poor Kate’s Charles.
Two days passed. Often in those two days would Bud come, asking anxiously if there was any answer yet from Charles. As often the maid of Colonsay reddened, and said with resignation there was not so much as the scrape of a pen. “He’ll be on the sea,” she explained at last, “and not near a post-office. Stop you till he gets near a post-office, and you’ll see the fine letter I’ll get.”
“I didn’t know he was a sailor,” said Bud. “Why, I calculated he was a Highland chieftain or a knight, or something like that. If I had known he was a sailor I’d have made that letter different. I’d have loaded it up to the nozzle with sloppy weather, and said, Oh, how sad I was—that’s you, Kate—to lie awake nights thinking about him out on the heaving billow. Is he a captain?”
“Yes,” said Kate promptly. “A full captain in the summer time. In the winter he just stays at home and helps on his mother’s farm. Not a cheep to your aunties about Charles, darling Lennox,” she added anxiously. “They’re—they’re that particular!”
“I don’t think you’re a true love at all,” said Bud, reflecting on many interviews at the kitchen window and the back-door. “Just think of the way you make goo-goo eyes at the letter-carrier, and the butcher’s man, and the ashpit gentleman. What would Charles say?”
“Toots! I’m only putting by the time with them,” explained the maid. “It’s only a diversion. When I marry I will marry for my own conveniency, and the man for me is Charles.”