"Talk about saving, I asked one of my women the other day if she had ever tried margarine. 'No,' she said earnestly, 'I niver touch it; an' if I'm oot at ma tea an' no' verra sure if it's butter, I juist tak' jeely.' I said no more.
"And now, my very dear, it is perilously near midnight, and there is not the slightest sound in this rather frightening old house, and not the slightest sound on the moor outside, and I am getting rather scared sitting up all alone. Besides, six o'clock comes very soon after midnight! I am so sleepy, with all my housework, that, like the herd laddie, I get no good out of my bed.—Goodnight, E."
*****
A more contented woman than Kirsty Hamilton née Christie it would have been difficult to find. Andrew Hamilton and Langhope Manse made to her "Paradise enow." The little hard lines had gone from her face, and she bustled about, a most efficient mistress, encouraging the small maid to do her best work, and helping with her own capable hands. She planned and cooked most savoury, thrifty dinners, and made every shilling do the work of two; it was all sheer delight to her. House-proud and husband-proud, she envied no one, and in fact sincerely pitied every other woman because she could not have her Andrew.
July, August, and September were three wonderful months to the Hamiltons. They spent them settling into the new house (daily finding new delights in it), working in the garden, and getting acquainted with the congregation.
After their one o'clock dinner, on good afternoons, they mounted their bicycles and visited outlying members. Often they were asked to wait for tea, such a fine farmhouse tea as town-bred Kirsty had never dreamed of; and then they cycled home in the gloaming, talking, talking all the time, until they came to their own gate—how good that sounded, their own gate—and having wheeled their bicycles to the shed, they would walk round the garden hand in hand, like happy children.
Andrew had generally something to show Kirsty, some small improvement, for he was a man of his hands; or if there was nothing new to see, they would always go and again admire his chief treasures—a mossy bank that in spring would be covered with violets, a stone dyke in which rock plants had been encouraged to grow, and a little humpbacked bridge hung with ferns.
The war did not trouble Kirsty much. She was rather provoked that it should have happened, for it hurt the church attendance and sadly thinned the choir, and when Andrew had finished reading the papers he would sometimes sit quite silent, looking before him, which made her vaguely uneasy.
Her own family were untouched by it. Archie had no thought of going to train, the notion seemed to him ludicrous in the extreme, but he saw his way to making some money fishing in the troubled waters. The Rev. Johnston Christie confined his usefulness to violent denunciations of the Kaiser from the pulpit every Sunday. He had been much impressed by a phrase used by a prominent Anglican bishop about the Nailed Hand beating the Mailed Fist—neat and telling he considered it, and used it on every possible occasion.
One afternoon in late October the Hamiltons were walking in their garden. They had been lunching at Etterick, and were going in shortly to have tea cosily by the study fire. It was a still day, with a touch of winter in the air—back end, the village people called it, but the stackyards were stocked, the potatoes and turnips were in pits, the byres were full of feeding cattle, so they were ready for what winter would bring them.