“Then why didn’t ye, why didn’t ye; and then it might have been the apples?” said poor Miss Bell. “You shouldn’t have minded me; I’m aye so domineering.”
“No, you’re not,” said Bud, and wanly smiling.
“Indeed I am; the thing’s acknowledged, and you needn’t deny it,” said her auntie. “I’m desperate domineering to you.”
“Well, I’m—I’m not kicking,” said Bud. It was the last cheerful expression she gave utterance to for many days.
Wanton Wully was not long the only one that morning in the sunny street. Women came out, unusually early, as it seemed, to beat their basses; but the first thing that they did was to look at the front of Daniel Dyce’s house with a kind of terror lest none of the blinds should be up, and Mr Dyce’s old kid glove should be off the knocker. “Have you heard what way she is keeping to-day?” they asked the bell-man.
“Not a cheep!” said he. “I saw Kate sweepin’ out her door-step, but I couldna ask her. That’s the curse of my occupation; I wish to goodness they had another man for the grave-diggin’.”
“You and your graves!” said the women. “Who was mentioning them?”
He stood on the syver-side and looked at the blank front of Daniel Dyce’s house with a gloomy eye. “A perfect caution!” he said, “that’s what she was—a perfect caution! She called me Mr Wanton and always asked me how was my legs.”
“Is there anything wrong with your legs?” said one of the women.
“Whiles a weakness,” said Wanton Wully, for he was no hypocrite. “Her uncle tellt me once it was a kind o’ weakness that they keep on gantrys down in Maggie White’s. But she does not understand—the wee one; quite the leddy! she thought it was a kind o’ gout. Me! I never had the gout,—I never had the money for it, more’s the pity.”