It was my grandfather who had come in, his face bronzed with the sun and a friendly shaving tucked underneath his coat collar at the back, witnessing that some one of his sons, in the labours of the pirn-mill, had not remembered the first commandment with promise.
His wife removed it with a smile, and said, “I’ll wager ye that was yon rascal Rob. He is always at his tricks!”
“Well, what were you saying about me, old wife?” said grandfather, looking at his wife with the quiet fondness that comes of half-a-century of companionship.
“Only that Jen there had a will-o’-the-wisp of a temper and that I knew not how she got it, for you only go about pouring oil upon the waters!”
“As to that, you know best, guidwife,” he answered, smiling, “but I think I have heard of a wife up about the Heathknowes, who in some measure possesses the power of her unruly member. It is possible that Jen there may have picked up a thorn or two from that side!”
William Lyon caught his daughter’s ear.
“Eh, lass, what sayest thou?” he crooned, looking down upon her with a tenderness rare to him with one of his children. “What sayest thou?”
“I say that you and mother and all about this house have run out of your wits about this slip of a girl? I say that you may rue it when you have not a son to succeed you at the Kirk of the Covenant down by the Ford.”
The fleeting of a smile came over my grandfather’s face, that quiet amusement which usually showed when my grandmother opposed her will to his, and when for once he did not mean to give in.
“It’s a sorrowful thing—a whole respectable household gone daft about a couple of strange children;” he let the words drop very slowly. “Specially I was distressed to hear of one who rose betimes to milk a cow, so that the cream would have time to rise on the morning’s milk by their porridge time!”