"But, Miss Aline, I think—it will be better for you to go at once—I am not going back to—to be insulted and treated like a child. I want to go, Miss Aline."
The old lady held up her hands from which the deep lace sleeves hung gracefully, while the half-mitts clung to the narrow wrists.
"Hoots—hoots, laddie! What's a' this? Ye hae been quarrelling with Patsy. For shame, Louis—eh, what's that? My puir lad, dinna tak' things to heart. She's a guid lass—what should onybody ken aboot her that I do not ken? Laddie, stop greetin'—Patsy would be terrible angry if she kenned I telled ye—but she wants ye to be a strong man—'a leader and not a follower.' Says she, 'I shall never care for a man that I can maister.'"
"Then she will never care for me," mourned poor Louis. "I can do things for her sake—I can do as she bids me, and I am always ready. But, Miss Aline, it does not seem to be the least good. That prince—"
"Never ye mind aboot princes—they are kittle-cattle, and Patsy was juist letting you see that ye should carry a speerit in ye that no prince in ony land could daunt."
"Oh, if it were only fighting," said Louis, "I should not be afraid. But as it is, I shall not set my foot here again till Patsy sends for me—"
"Which she is like to do the morn's mornin', just to see if ye are still in the sulks! Laddie, can ye no see that it is just an amusement to her? She doesna mean to be cruel, but only wants ye to be a man amang men—and mair parteeclar amang weemen!"
"Yes, I know," said Louis, disconsolately, "she does it for my good. She has explained that to me several times. But somehow it does not seem to help much!"
"Louis Raincy," said the old lady, severe for the first time, "be a worthy son of your forbears. There are forty of them in the Raincy chapel up yonder in the wood. It wad be an awesome thing to be carried in among them and you not worthy. I am a woman—an auld maid if you like—but I am a Minto, and here I am braving the great ones of the earth to look after Patsy—me that would a thousand times raither be at Ladykirk with Eelen Young and that silly Babby Latheron, weighing out the sugar and spices for the late conserves—the bramble and the damsons and the elderberry wine."
In spite of all this good advice, or perhaps because of it, Louis Raincy went off without returning to the drawing-room, and with what he took to be despair in his heart. Patsy was by no means the old Patsy. She would never be again. Yet when he began to turn matters over in his head after he had reached his quarters, he could not remember a time when Patsy had not tyrannized over him, trampled him under foot, and variously abused him, even from the time of their infantile plays with sand castles and sea-shells built, architected, and ornamented on the seashore between the Black Head and the estuary of the Mays Water.