"And I suppose those scarlet signals at the fore signify"——
"Nothing!"
"Fast colors, I see."
"It's my father's own color, and I'm proud of it,—barring the telltale trouble."
"You're proud," said he, absently, standing up to go, "that you are the only one of them all that heirs him?"
"Not quite. It's the olive in my father's cheek that darkened his wife's yellow curls into Mary Strathsay's chestnut ones. And she's like me in more than that, gin she doesn't sell hersel' for siller and gowd."
"I'll tell you what. Mrs. Strathsay is over-particular in speech. She'll have none of the broad Highland tongue about her. It's a daily struggle that she has, not to strike Nurse Nannie dumb, since she has infected you all with her dialect. A word in time. Now I must go. To-morrow night I'll come and take you to the play, Miss Dunreddin or no Miss Dunreddin. But sing to me first. It's a weary while since I used to hear that voice crooning itself to sleep across the hall with little songs."
So I sang the song he chose, "My love, she's but a lassie yet"; and he took the bunch of bluebells from my braids, and was gone.
The next night Angus was as good as his word. Miss Dunreddin was already off on her pleasuring, he took the gray little governess for duenna, and a blither three never sat out a tragedy, or laughed over wine and oysters in the midst of a garden with its flowers and fountains afterwards. 'T was a long day since the poor little woman had known such merrymaking; and as for me, this playhouse, this mimicry of life, was a new sphere. We went again and again,—sometimes the painting-mistress, too; then she and the governess fell behind, and Angus and I walked at our will. Other times we wandered through the gay streets, or we went up on the hill and sat out the sunsets, and we strolled through the two towns, high and low. The days sped, the long shine of the summer days, and, oh, my soul was growing in them like a weed in the sun!
It never entered my happy little thoughts all this time that what was my delight might yet be Angus's dole; for, surely, a school-girl is so interesting to no one else as herself, while she continually comes upon all the fresh problems in her nature. So, when a day passed that I heard no step in the hall, no cheery voice rousing the sleepy echoes with my name, I was restless enough. Monday, Tuesday,—no Angus. I ought to have thought whether or no he had found some of his fine friends, and if they had no right to a fragment of his time; yet I was but a child. The third day dawned and passed, and at length, sitting there among the evening shadows in the long class-room, a little glumly, the doors clanged as of old, a loud, laughing sentence was tossed up to the little gray governess at the stair-head, then, three steps at a time, he had mounted, and was within,—and what with my heart in my throat and its bewildered beating, I could not utter a word. I but sprang to the window and made as if I had been amusing myself there: I would have no Angus Ingestre be thinking that he was all the world to me, and I nought to him.