WHEN Kate that afternoon was told her hour was come, and that to-morrow she must meet her destined mariner, she fell into a chair, threw her apron over her head, and cried and laughed horribly turn about—the victim of hysteria that was half from fear and half from a bliss too deep and unexpected.

“Mercy on me!” she exclaimed. “Now he'll find out everything, and what a stupid one I am. All my education's clean gone out of my head; I'm sure I couldn't spell an article. I canna even mind the ninth commandment, let alone the Reasons Annexed, and as for grammar, whether it's 'Give the book to Bud and me,' or 'Give the book to Bud and I,' is more than I could tell you if my very life depended on it. Oh, Lennox, now we're going to catch it! Are you certain sure he said to-morrow?”

Bud gazed at her disdainfully and stamped her foot. “Stop that, Kate MacNeill!” she commanded. “You mustn't act so silly. He's as skeered of you as you can be of him. He'd have been here Friday before the morning milk if he didn't think you'd be the sort to back him into a corner and ask him questions about ancient Greece and Rome. Seems to me love makes some folk idiotic; land's sake! I'm mighty glad it always leaves me calm as a plate of pumpkin-pie.”

“Is—is—he looking tremendously genteel and wellput-on?” asked the maid of Colonsay, with anxious lines on her forehead. “Is he—is he as nice as I said he was?”

“He was everything you said—except the Gaelic. I knew he couldn't be so bad as that sounded that you said about his eyes. I—I never saw a more becoming man. If I had known just how noble he looked, I'd have sent him stacks of poetry,” whereat Kate moaned again, rocked herself in her chair most piteously, and swore she could never have the impudence to see him till she had her new frock from the dressmaker's.

“He'll be thinking I'm refined and quite the lady,” she said, “and I'm just the same plain Kate I was in Colonsay, and him a regular captain! It was all your fault, with your fancy letters. Oh, Lennox Dyce, I think I hate you, just—lend me your hanky; mine's all wet with greeting.”

“If you weren't so big and temper wasn't sinful, I'd shake you!” said Bud, producing her handkerchief. “You were just on your last legs for a sailor, and you'd never have put a hand on one if I didn't write these letters. And now, when the sweetest sailor in the land is brought to your door-step, you don't 'preciate your privileges and have a grateful heart, but turn round and yelp at me. I tell you, Kate MacNeill, sailors are mighty scarce and sassy in a little place like this, and none too easy picked up, and 'stead of sitting there, with a smut on your nose and tidemarks on your eyebrows, mourning, you'd best arise and shine, or somebody with their wits about them 'll snap him up. I'd do it myself if it wouldn't be not honorable to you.”

“Oh, if I just had another week or two's geography!” said Kate, dolefully.

Bud had to laugh—she could not help herself; and the more she laughed, the more tragic grew the servant's face.

“Seems to me,” said Bud, “that I've got to run this loving business all along the line; you don't know the least thing about it after g-o, go. Why, Kate, I'm telling you Charles is afraid of you more than you are of him. He thought you'd be that educated you'd wear specs, and stand quite stiff talking poetry all the time, and I had to tell him every dinky bit in these letters were written by me.”

“Then that's worse!” cried the servant, more distressed than ever. “For he'll think I canna write myself, and I can write like fury if you only give me a decent pen and don't bother me.”

“No fears!” said Bud; “I made that all right. I said you were too busy housekeeping, and I guess it's more a housekeeper than a school-marm Charles needs. Anyhow, he's so much in love with you, he'd marry you if you were a deaf-mute; he's plumb head over heels, and it's up to you, as a sensible girl, not to conceal that you like him some yourself.”

“I'll not know what to say to him,” said Kate, “and he always was so clever; half the time I couldna understand him if it wasn't for his eyes.”

“Well, he'll know what to say to you, I guess, if all the signs are right. Charles is not so shy as all that—love-making is where he lives, and he made goo-goo eyes at myself without an introduction. You'd fancy, to hear you, he was a school inspector, and he's only just an or'nary lover thinking of the happy days you used to have in Colonsay. If I was you I'd not let on I was anything but what I really was; I'd be natural; yes, that's what I'd be, for being natural's the deadliest thing below the canopy to make folk love you. Don't pretend, but just be the same Kate MacNeill to him you are to me. Just you listen to him, and now and then look at him, and don't think of a darned thing—I mean don't think of a blessed thing but how nice he is, and he'll be so pleased and so content he'll not even ask you to spell cat.”

“Content!” cried Kate, with conviction. “Not him! Fine I ken him! He'll want to kiss me, as sure as God's in heaven—beg your pardon.”

“I expect that's not a thing you should say to me,” said Bud, blushing deeply.

“But I begged your pardon,” said the maid.

“I don't mean that about God in heaven, that's right—so He is, or where would we be?—what I meant was about the kissing. I'm old enough for love, but I'm not old enough for you to be talking to me about kissing, I guess Auntie Ailie wouldn't like to have you talk to me about a thing like that, and Auntie Bell, she'd be furious—it's too advanced.”

“What time am I to see him?” asked Kate.

“In the morning. If you go out to the garden just after breakfast, and whistle, he'll look over the wall.”

“The morning!” cried the maid, aghast. “I couldn't face him in the morning. Who ever heard of such a thing? Now you have gone away and spoiled everything! I could hardly have all my wits about me even if it was only gloaming.”

Bud sighed despairingly. “Oh, you don't understand, Kate,” said she. “He wanted it to be the evening, too, but I said you weren't a miserable pair of owls, and the best time for anything is the morning. Uncle Dan says the first half-hour in the morning is worth three hours at any other time of the day, for when you've said your prayers, and had a good bath, and a clean shave, and your boots new on—no slippers nor slithery dressing-gowns—the peace of God and—and—and the assurance of strength and righteousness descends upon you so that you—you—you can tackle wild-cats. I feel so brash and brave myself in the morning I could skip the hills like a goat. It's simply got to be the morning, Kate MacNeill. That's when you look your very best, if you care to take a little trouble, and don't simply just slouch through, and I'm set on having you see him first time over the garden wall. That's the only way to fix the thing up romantic, seeing we haven't any balcony. You'll go out and stand against the blossom of the cherry-tree, and hold a basket of flowers and parsley, and when he peeks over and sees you looming out the picture, I tell you he'll be tickled to death. That's the way Shakespeare 'd fix it, and he knew.”

“I don't think much of Shakespeare,” said Kate. “Fancy yon Igoa!”

“Iago, you mean. Well, what about him?”

“The wickedness of him; such a lot of lies!”

“Pooh!” said Bud. “He was only for the effect. Of course there never really was such a mean, wicked man as that Iago—there couldn't be—but Shakespeare made him just so's you'd like the nice folk all the more by thinking what they might have been if God had let Himself go.”

That night Kate was abed by eight. Vainly the town cried for her—the cheerful passage of feet on the pavement, and a tinkler piper at the Cross, and she knew how bright was the street, with the late-lit windows of the shops, and how intoxicating was the atmosphere of Saturday in the dark, but having said her Lord's Prayer in Gaelic, and “Now I lay me down to sleep” in English, she covered her head with the blankets and thought of the coming day with joy and apprehension, until she fell asleep.

In the morning Miss Bell had no sooner gone up to the making of beds, that was her Sabbath care to save the servant-maid from too much sin, and Ailie to her weekly reading with the invalid Duncan Gill, than Bud flew into the kitchen to make Kate ready for her tryst. Never in this world were breakfast dishes sooner cleaned and dried than by that eager pair; no sooner were they done than Kate had her chest-lid up, and had dived, head foremost, among her Sunday finery.

“What's that?” asked Bud. “You're not going to put on glad rags, are you?” For out there came a blue gown, fondled tenderly.

“Of course I am,” said Kate. “It's either that or my print for it, and a print wrapper would not be the thing at all to meet—meet the Captain in; he'll be expecting me to be truly refined.”

“I think he'd like the wrapper better,” said Bud, gravely. “The blue gown's very nice—but it's not Kate, somehow; do you know, I think it's Auntie Ailie up to about the waist, and the banker's cook in the lacey bits above that, and it don't make you refined a bit. It's not what you put on that makes you refined, it's things you can't take off. You have no idea how sweet you look in that print, Kate, with your cap and apron. You look better in them than if you wore the latest yell of fashion. I'd want to marry you myself if I was a captain and saw you dressed like that; but if you had on your Sunday gown I'd—I'd bite my lip and go home and ask advice from mother.”

Kate put past the blue gown, not very willingly, but she had learned by now that in some things Bud had better judgment than herself. She washed and dried her face till it shone like a polished apple, put on Bud's choice of a cap and streamered apron, and was about to take a generous dash of Florida Water when she found her hand restrained.

“I'd have no scent,” said Bud. “I like scent myself, some, and I just dote on our Florida Water, but Auntie Ailie says the scent of clean water, sun, and air, is the sweetest a body can have about one, and any other kind's as rude as Keating's Powder.”

“He'll be expecting the Florida Water,” said Kate, “seeing that it was himself that sent it.”

“It don't amount to a hill of beans,” said Bud; “you can wear our locket, and that 'll please him.” Kate went with a palpitating heart through the scullery, out into the garden, with a basket in her hand, a pleasing and expansive figure. Bud would have liked to watch her, but a sense of delicacy prevented, and she stood at the kitchen window looking resolutely into the street. On his way down the stairs Mr. Dyce was humming the Hundredth Psalm; outside the shops were shuttered, and the harmony of the morning hymn came from the baker's open windows. A few folk passed in their Sunday clothes, at a deliberate pace, to differentiate it from the secular hurry of other days. Soon the church bell would ring for the Sabbath-school, and Bud must be ready. Remembering it, a sense of some impiety took possession of her—worldly trysts in back gardens on the Sabbath were not what Aunt Bell would much approve of. Had they met yet? How did Charles look? What did Kate say?

“Mercy on me!” cried the maid, bursting in through the scullery. “Did you say I was to whistle?”

“Of course,” said Bud, and then looked horrified “Oh, Kate,” said she, in a whisper, “I was so keen on the vain things of this wicked world I quite forgot it was the Lord's Day; of course you can't go whistling on Sunday.”

“That's what I was just thinking to myself,” said the maid, not very heartily. “But I thought I would ask you. It wouldn't need to be a time, but—but of course it would be awful wicked—forbye Miss Dyce would be sure to hear me, and she's that particular.”

“No, you can't whistle; you daren't,” said Bud. “It'd be dre'ffle wicked. But how'd it do to throw a stone? Not a rock, you know, but a nice little quiet wee white Sunday pebble? You might like as not be throwing it at Rodger's cats, and that would be a work of necessity and mercy, for these cruel cats are just death on birds.”

“But there's not a single cat there,” explained the maid.

“Never mind,” said Bud. “You can heave the pebble over the wall so that it 'll be a warning to them not to come poaching in our garden; there's sure to be some on the other side just about to get on the wall; and if Charles happens to be there, can you help that?” and Kate retired again.

There was a pause, and then a sound of laughter. For ten minutes Bud waited in an agony of curiosity, that was at last too much for her, and she ventured to look out at the scullery window—to see Charles chasing his adored one down the walk, between the bleaching-green and the gooseberries. Kate was making for the sanctuary of her kitchen, her face aflame and all her streamers flying, but was caught before she entered.

“I told you!” said she, as she came in panting. “We hadn't said twenty words when he wanted to kiss me.”

“Why! was that the reason you ran?” asked Bud, astonished.

“Ye—yes,” said the maid.

“Seems to me it's not very encouraging to Charles, then.”

“Yes, but—but I wasn't running all my might,” said Kate.