“Well, romancing!” said Miss Bell. “What’s romancing, if you leave out Walter Scott? I am glad she has a conviction of the sin of it herself. If she had slipped away from us on Wednesday this letter would have been upon her soul. It’s vexing her now.”
“If that is so, it’s time her mind was relieved,” said Ailie, and rising, sped to the garden with the letter in her hand. Her heart bled to see the apprehension on Bud’s face, and beside her, Dan, stroking her hair and altogether bewildered.
“Bud,” cried Ailie, kissing her, “do you think you could invent a lover for me who would write me letters half so interesting as this? It’s a lover like that I have all the time been waiting for: the ordinary kind, by all my reading, must be very dull in their correspondence, and the lives they lead deplorably humdrum—
“‘Oh, Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling;
Oh, Charlie is my darling, the young marineer.’
After this I’ll encourage only sailors: Bud, dear, get me a nice clean sailor. But I stipulate that he must be more discriminating with his capitals, and know that the verb must agree with its nominative, and not be quite so much confused in his geography.”
“You’re not angry with me, Aunt?” said Bud, in a tone of great relief, with the bloom coming back. “Was it very, very wicked?”
“Pooh!” said Ailie. “If that’s wicked, where’s our Mr Shakespeare? Oh, child! child! you are my own heart’s treasure. I thought a girl called Alison I used to know long ago was long since dead and done with, and here she’s to the fore yet, daft as ever, and her name is Lennox Dyce.”
“No, it wasn’t Lennox wrote that letter,” said Bud; “it was Winifred Wallace, and oh, my! she’s a pretty tough proposition. You’re quite, quite sure it wasn’t fibbing.”
“No more than Cinderella’s fibbing,” said her aunt, and flourished the letter in the face of Dan, who she saw was going to enter some dissent. “Behold, Dan Dyce, the artist b-r-r-rain! Calls sailor sweethearts from the vasty deep, and they come obedient to her bidding. Spise and perils, Dan, and the golden horn a trifle out of its latitude, and the darling boy that’s always being drove from home. One thing you overlooked in the boy, Bud—the hectic flush. I’m sure Kate would have liked a touch of the hectic flush in him.”
But Bud was still contrite, thinking of the servant. “She was so set upon a letter from her Charles,” she explained, “and now she’ll have to know that I was joshing her. Perhaps I shouldn’t say joshing, Auntie Ailie,—I s’pose it’s slang.”