“She’s better, Mr Dyce, I’m hearing,” said P. & A. MacGlashan, wiping his hands on his apron, to prepare for a fervent clasp from one who, he ought to have known, was not of the fervent-clasping kind.
“Thank God! Thank God!” said Mr Dyce. “You would know she was pretty far through?”
“Well—we kind of jaloused. But we kent there was no danger—the thing would be ridiculous!” said P. & A. MacGlashan, and went into his shop in a hurry, much uplifted too, and picked out a big bunch of black grapes and sent his boy with them, with his compliments, to Miss Lennox Dyce, care of Daniel Dyce, Esquire, Writer.
Miss Minto so adored the man she could not show herself to him in an hour like that; for she knew that she must weep, and a face begrutten ill became her, so in she came from the door of her Emporium and watched him pass the window. She saw in him what she had never seen before—for in his clothing he was always trim and tidy, quite perjink, as hereabouts we say: she saw, with the sharp eyes of a woman who looks at the man she would like to manage, that his hat was dusty and his boots not very brightly polished. More than all the news that leaked that week from the Dyces’ dwelling it realised for her the state of things there.
“Tcht! tcht! tcht!” she said to herself; “three of them yonder, and he’s quite neglected!” She went into a back room, where gathered the stuff for her Great Annual Jumble Sales with ninepenny things at sevenpence ha’penny, and searched a drawer that sometimes had revealed tremendous joy to Lennox and other bairns who were privileged to see what they called “Miss Minto’s back.” In the drawer there was a doll called Grace, a large, robust, and indestructible wooden child that had shared Miss Minto’s youth and found the years more kindly than she, since it got no wrinkles thinking on the cares of competition in the millinery and mantua-making trade, but dozed its days away upon feathers and silk and velvet swatches. Grace was dressed like a queen—if queens are attired in gorgeous hand-stitched remnants; she had so long been part of Miss Minto’s life that the mantua-maker swithered in her first intention. But she thought how happy Mr Dyce must be that day, and hurriedly packed the doll in a box and went round herself with it for Lennox Dyce.
As she knocked lightly at the front door, the old kid glove came loose in her hand—an omen! One glance up and down the street to see that no one noticed her, and then she slipped it in her pocket, with a guilty countenance. She was not young, at least she was not in her ’teens, but young enough to do a thing like that for luck and her liking of Daniel Dyce. Yet her courage failed her, and when Kate came to the door the first thing she handed to her was the glove.
“It fell off,” she said. “I hope it means that it’s no longer needed. And this is a little thing for Miss Lennox, Kate; you will give her it with my compliments. I hear there’s an improvement?”
“You wouldna believe it!” said Kate. “Thank God, she’ll soon be carrying-on as bad as ever!”
Mr Dyce would not have cared a rap that morning if he had come upon his clerks at Catch-the-Ten, or even playing leapfrog on their desks. He was humming a psalm you may guess at as he looked at the documents heaped on his table—his calf-bound books and the dark japanned deed-boxes round his room.
“Everything just the same, and business still going on!” he said to his clerk. “Dear me! dear me! what a desperate world! Do you know, I had the notion that everything was stopped. No, when I think of it I oftener fancied all this was a dream.”