'After all, was she as lonely,' she thought, 'as Bett Hutchinson, who lived by herself, with only a tabby cat for company, and kept her coal-cellar in her bedroom? and yet, though Bett had weak eyes and weak nerves, and was clean out of her wits on the subject of the boggle family, from the "boggle with twa heeds" down to Jock's "bargheist ahint the yat-stoop."'
Bett's superstition was a household word with her neighbours, 'daft Bett and her boggles' affording a mine of entertainment to the gossips of Nateby. Mildred, and latterly Hugh Marsden, had endeavoured to reason Bett out of her fancies, but it was no use. 'I saw summut—nay, nay, I saw summut,' she always persisted. 'I was a'most daft—'twas t'boggle, and nought else,' she murmured.
Mildred was no weak girl, to go moaning about the world because her heart must be emptied of its chief treasure. Bett's penurious loneliness read her a salutary lesson; her own life, saddened as it was, grew rich by comparison. '"If in mercy Thou wilt spare joys that yet are mine,"' she whispered, as she laid the sleeping child down in the wooden cot and spread the patched quilt lovingly over him.
Jock grinned at her from behind an oyster-shell and mud erection; lile Geordie and Dawson's Sue were with him. 'Aw've just yan hawpenny left,' she heard him say as she passed.
Mildred had finished the hardest day's work that she had ever done in her life, but she knew that it was not yet over. Dr. Heriot was not one to linger over a generous impulse; 'If it is worth doing at all, one should do it at once,' was a favourite maxim of his.
Mildred knew well what she had to expect. She was only thankful that the summer's dusk allowed her to slip past the long French window that always stood open. They were lighting the lamp already—some one, probably Olive, had asked for it. A voice, that struck Mildred cold with a sudden anguish, railed playfully against bookworms who could not afford a blind-man's holiday.
'He is here; of course I knew how it would be,' she murmured, as she groped her way a little feebly up the stairs. She would have given much for a quiet half-hour in her room, but it was not to be; the tapping sound she dreaded already struck upon her ear, the crisp rustle of garments in the passage, then the faint knock and timid entrance. 'I knew it was Polly. Come in; do you want me, my dear?' the tired voice striving bravely after cheerfulness.
'Aunt Milly—oh, Aunt Milly!—I thought you would never come;' and in the dark two soft little hands clasped her tight, and a burning face hid itself in her neck. 'Oh,' with a sort of gasp, 'I have wanted my Aunt Milly so badly!'
Then the noble, womanly heart opened with a great rush of tenderness, and took in the girl who had so unconsciously become a rival.
'What is this, my pet—not tears, surely?' for Polly had laid her head down, and was sobbing hysterically with excitement and relief.