“And amna I the best guide ye ever had in a’ your life?” said Jenny, as she closed the conversation by assuming her place beside her husband and extinguishing the candle.
Leaving this couple to their repose, we have next to inform the reader that, early on the next morning, two ladies on horseback, attended by their servants, arrived at the house of Fairy Knowe, whom, to Jenny’s utter confusion, she instantly recognised as Miss Bellenden and Lady Emily Hamilton, a sister of Lord Evandale.
“Had I no better gang to the house to put things to rights?” said Jenny, confounded with this unexpected apparition.
“We want nothing but the pass-key,” said Miss Bellenden; “Gudyill will open the windows of the little parlour.”
“The little parlour’s locked, and the lock’s, spoiled,” answered Jenny, who recollected the local spmpathy between that apartment and the bedchamber of her guest.
“In the red parlour, then,” said Miss Bellenden, and rode up to the front of the house, but by an approach different from that through which Morton had been conducted.
“All will be out,” thought Jenny, “unless I can get him smuggled out of the house the back way.”
So saying, she sped up the bank in great tribulation and uncertainty.
“I had better hae said at ante there was a stranger there,” was her next natural reflection. “But then they wad hae been for asking him to breakfast. Oh, safe us! what will I do?—And there’s Gudyill walking in the garden too!” she exclaimed internally on approaching the wicket; “and I daurna gang in the back way till he’s aff the coast. Oh, sirs! what will become of us?”
In this state of perplexity she approached the cidevant butler, with the purpose of decoying him out of the garden. But John Gudyill’s temper was not improved by his decline in rank and increase in years. Like many peevish people, too, he seemed to have an intuitive perception as to what was most likely to teaze those whom he conversed with; and, on the present occasion, all Jenny’s efforts to remove him from the garden served only to root him in it as fast as if he had been one of the shrubs.