Wanton Wully only briefly rang the morning bell, and gingerly, with tight-shut lips and deep nose breathings, as if its loud alarm could so be mitigated. Once before he had done it just as delicately—when the Earl was dying, and the bell-ringer, uncertain of his skill to toll, when the time came, with the right half-minute pauses, grieved the town and horrified the Castle by a rehearsal in the middle of a winter night. But no soul of mercy is in brazen bells that hang aloof from man in lofty steeples, and this one, swung ever so gently, sullenly boomed—boomed—boomed.

“Oh, to the devil wi’ ye!” said Wanton Wully, sweating with vexation. “Of all the senseless bells! A big, boss bluiter! I canna compel nor coax ye!” and he gave the rope one vicious tug that brought it, broken, round his ears; then went from the church into the sunny, silent, morning street, where life and the day suspended.

In faith! a senseless bell, a merciless bell, waking folk to toil and grief. Dr Brash and Ailie heavy-eyed, beside the bed in the attic bower, shivered at the sound of it, and looked with fear and yearning at the sleeping child.

Bud moved her head from side to side a little on the pillow, with a murmur from her parched lips, and there was a flicker of the eyelids—that was all. Between her and the everlasting swound, where giddily swings the world and all its living things, there seemed no more than a sheet of tissue-paper: it was as if a breath of the tender morning air would quench the wavering flame that once was joy and Lennox Dyce. The heart of Auntie Ailie rose clamouring in her bosom; her eyes stung with the brine of tears restrained, but she clenched her teeth that she might still be worthy of the doctor’s confidence.

He saw it, and put out his hand and pressed her shoulder, a fat old-fashioned man, well up in years, with whiskers under his chin like a cravat, yet beautiful as a prince to Ailie, for on him all her hopes were cast. “They call me agnostic—atheist even, whiles, I hear,” he had said in the midst of their vigil; “and, indeed, I’m sometimes beat to get my mind beyond the mechanism, but—h’m!—a fine child, a noble child; she was made for something—h’m! That mind and talent—h’m!—that spirit—h’m!—the base of it was surely never yon grey stuff in the convolutions.” And another time the minister had come in (the folk in the street were furious to see him do it!), and timidly suggested prayer. “Prayer!” said Dr Brash, “before this child, and her quite conscious! Man, what in God’s own name are we doing here, this—h’m!—dear good lady and I, but fever ourselves with sleepless, silent prayer? Do you think a proper prayer must be official? There’s not a drop of stuff in a druggist’s bottle but what’s a solution of hope and faith and—h’m!—prayer. Con-found it, sir!”

He put out his hand and pressed her on the shoulder, and never said a word. Oh, the doctors! the doctors! Hale men and hearty, we can see their shortcomings and can smile at them, but when the night-light burns among the phials!

It was the eighth day after Kate, with a face of clay, and her sleeves rolled up, and the dough still on her elbows as she had come from the baking-board, burst upon the doctor in his surgery with the cry, “Dr Brash, Dr Brash! ye’re to haste ye and come at once to the wee one!” He had gone as nearly on the wings of the wind as a fat man may in carpet-slippers, and found a distracted family round the fevered child.

“Tut, tut, lassie,” said he, chucking her lightly under the chin. “What new prank is this, to be pretending illness? Or if it’s not a let-on, I’ll be bound it’s MacGlashan’s almond tablet.”

“It’s these cursÈd crab-apples in the garden; I’m sure it’s the crab-apples, doctor,” said Miss Bell, looking ten years older than her usual.

“H’m! I think not,” said Dr Brash more gravely, with his finger on the pulse.

“It’s bound to be,” said Bell, piteous at having to give up her only hope. “Didn’t you eat some yesterday, pet, after I told you that you were not for your life to touch them?”

“No,” said Bud, with hot and heavy breathing.

“Then why didn’t ye, why didn’t ye; and then it might have been the apples?” said poor Miss Bell. “You shouldn’t have minded me; I’m aye so domineering.”

“No, you’re not,” said Bud, and wanly smiling.

“Indeed I am; the thing’s acknowledged, and you needn’t deny it,” said her auntie. “I’m desperate domineering to you.”

“Well, I’m—I’m not kicking,” said Bud. It was the last cheerful expression she gave utterance to for many days.

Wanton Wully was not long the only one that morning in the sunny street. Women came out, unusually early, as it seemed, to beat their basses; but the first thing that they did was to look at the front of Daniel Dyce’s house with a kind of terror lest none of the blinds should be up, and Mr Dyce’s old kid glove should be off the knocker. “Have you heard what way she is keeping to-day?” they asked the bell-man.

“Not a cheep!” said he. “I saw Kate sweepin’ out her door-step, but I couldna ask her. That’s the curse of my occupation; I wish to goodness they had another man for the grave-diggin’.”“You and your graves!” said the women. “Who was mentioning them?”

He stood on the syver-side and looked at the blank front of Daniel Dyce’s house with a gloomy eye. “A perfect caution!” he said, “that’s what she was—a perfect caution! She called me Mr Wanton and always asked me how was my legs.”

“Is there anything wrong with your legs?” said one of the women.

“Whiles a weakness,” said Wanton Wully, for he was no hypocrite. “Her uncle tellt me once it was a kind o’ weakness that they keep on gantrys down in Maggie White’s. But she does not understand—the wee one; quite the leddy! she thought it was a kind o’ gout. Me! I never had the gout,—I never had the money for it, more’s the pity.”

He went disconsolate down the street to get his brush and barrow, for he was, between the morning bell and breakfast-time, the burgh’s Cleansing Department. Later—till the middle of the day—he was the Harbour-Master, wore a red-collared coat and chased the gulls from the roofs of the shipping-boxes and the boys from the slip-side where they might fall in and drown themselves; his afternoons had half a dozen distinct official cares, of which, in that wholesome air, grave-digging came seldomest. This morning he swept assiduously and long before the house of Daniel Dyce. Workmen passing yawning to their tasks in wood and garden, field and shed, looked at the muffled knocker and put the question; their wives, making, a little later, a message to the well, stopped too, put down their water-stoups, and speculated on the state of things within. Smoke rose from more than one chimney in the Dyces’ house. “It’s the parlour fire,” said Wanton Wully. “It means breakfast. Cheery Dan, they say, aye makes a hearty breakfast; I like to see the gift in a man mysel’, though I never had it; it’s a good sign o’ him the night before.”

Peter the post came clamping by-and-by along the street with his letters, calling loudly up the closes, less willing than usual to climb the long stairs, for he was in a hurry to reach the Dyces’. Not the window for him this morning, nor had it been so for a week, since Kate no longer hung on the sashes, having lost all interest in the outer world. He went tiptoe through the flagged close to the back-door and lightly tapped.

“What way is she this morning?” said he, in the husky whisper that was the best he could control his voice to, and in his eagerness almost mastered his roving eye.

“She’s got the turn!—she’s got the turn!” said the maid, transported. “Miss Dyce was down the now and told me that her temper was reduced.”

“Lord help us! I never knew she had one,” said the post.

“It’s no’ temper that I mean,” said Kate, “but yon thing that you measure wi’ the weather-glass the doctor’s aye so cross wi’ that he shakes and shakes and shakes at it. But anyway she’s better. I hope Miss Ailie will come down for a bite; if not, she’ll starve hersel’”

“That’s rare! By George, that’s tip-top!” said the postman, so uplifted that he went off with the M.C. step he used at Masons’ balls, and would have clean forgotten to give Kate the letters if she had not cried him back.

Wanton Wully sat on a barrow-tram waiting the postman’s exit. “What way is she?” said he, and Peter’s errant eye cocked to all airts of the compass. What he wanted was to keep this tit-bit to himself, to have the satisfaction of passing it along with his letters. To give it to Wanton Wully at this stage would be to throw away good fortune. It was said by Daniel Dyce that the only way to keep a dead secret in the burgh was to send Wully and his handbell round the town with it as public crier. When Wanton Wully cried, it beat you to understand a word he said after “Notice!” but unofficially he was marvellously gleg at circulating news. “What way is she?” he asked again, seeing the postman’s hesitation.

“If ye’ll promise to stick to the head o’ the toun and let me alone in the ither end, I’ll tell ye,” said Peter, and it was so agreed.

But they had not long all the glory of the good tidings to themselves. Dr Brash came out of Dyce’s house for the first time in two days, very sunken in the eyes and sorely needing shaving, and it could be noticed by the dullest that he had his jaunty walk and a flower in the lapel of his badly-crushed coat. Ailie put it there with trembling fingers; she could have kissed the man besides, if there had not been the chance that he might think her only another silly woman. Later Footles hurled himself in fury from the doorway, his master close behind him. At the sight of Mr Dyce the street was happy; it was the first time they had seen him for a week. In burgh towns that are small enough we have this compensation, that if we have to grieve in common over many things, a good man’s personal joy exalts us all.

“She’s better, Mr Dyce, I’m hearing,” said P. & A. MacGlashan, wiping his hands on his apron, to prepare for a fervent clasp from one who, he ought to have known, was not of the fervent-clasping kind.

“Thank God! Thank God!” said Mr Dyce. “You would know she was pretty far through?”

“Well—we kind of jaloused. But we kent there was no danger—the thing would be ridiculous!” said P. & A. MacGlashan, and went into his shop in a hurry, much uplifted too, and picked out a big bunch of black grapes and sent his boy with them, with his compliments, to Miss Lennox Dyce, care of Daniel Dyce, Esquire, Writer.

Miss Minto so adored the man she could not show herself to him in an hour like that; for she knew that she must weep, and a face begrutten ill became her, so in she came from the door of her Emporium and watched him pass the window. She saw in him what she had never seen before—for in his clothing he was always trim and tidy, quite perjink, as hereabouts we say: she saw, with the sharp eyes of a woman who looks at the man she would like to manage, that his hat was dusty and his boots not very brightly polished. More than all the news that leaked that week from the Dyces’ dwelling it realised for her the state of things there.

“Tcht! tcht! tcht!” she said to herself; “three of them yonder, and he’s quite neglected!” She went into a back room, where gathered the stuff for her Great Annual Jumble Sales with ninepenny things at sevenpence ha’penny, and searched a drawer that sometimes had revealed tremendous joy to Lennox and other bairns who were privileged to see what they called “Miss Minto’s back.” In the drawer there was a doll called Grace, a large, robust, and indestructible wooden child that had shared Miss Minto’s youth and found the years more kindly than she, since it got no wrinkles thinking on the cares of competition in the millinery and mantua-making trade, but dozed its days away upon feathers and silk and velvet swatches. Grace was dressed like a queen—if queens are attired in gorgeous hand-stitched remnants; she had so long been part of Miss Minto’s life that the mantua-maker swithered in her first intention. But she thought how happy Mr Dyce must be that day, and hurriedly packed the doll in a box and went round herself with it for Lennox Dyce.

As she knocked lightly at the front door, the old kid glove came loose in her hand—an omen! One glance up and down the street to see that no one noticed her, and then she slipped it in her pocket, with a guilty countenance. She was not young, at least she was not in her ’teens, but young enough to do a thing like that for luck and her liking of Daniel Dyce. Yet her courage failed her, and when Kate came to the door the first thing she handed to her was the glove.“It fell off,” she said. “I hope it means that it’s no longer needed. And this is a little thing for Miss Lennox, Kate; you will give her it with my compliments. I hear there’s an improvement?”

“You wouldna believe it!” said Kate. “Thank God, she’ll soon be carrying-on as bad as ever!”

Mr Dyce would not have cared a rap that morning if he had come upon his clerks at Catch-the-Ten, or even playing leapfrog on their desks. He was humming a psalm you may guess at as he looked at the documents heaped on his table—his calf-bound books and the dark japanned deed-boxes round his room.

“Everything just the same, and business still going on!” he said to his clerk. “Dear me! dear me! what a desperate world! Do you know, I had the notion that everything was stopped. No, when I think of it I oftener fancied all this was a dream.”

“Not Menzies v. Kilblane at any rate,” said the clerk, with his hand on a bulky Process, for he was a cheery soul and knew the mind of Daniel Dyce.

“I daresay not,” said the lawyer. “That plea will last a while, I’m thinking. And all about a five-pound fence! Let you and me, Alexander, thank our stars there are no sick bairns in the house of either Menzies or Kilblane, for then they would understand how much their silly fence mattered, and pity be on our canty wee Table-of-Fees!” He tossed over the papers with an impatient hand. “Trash!” said he. “What frightful trash! I can’t be bothered with them—not to-day. They’re no more to me than a docken leaf. And last week they were almost everything. You’ll have heard the child has got the turn?”

“I should think I did!” said Alexander. “And no one better pleased to hear it!”

“Thank you, Alick. How’s the family?”

“Fine,” said the clerk.“Let me think, now—seven, isn’t it? A big responsibility.”

“Not so bad as long’s we have the health,” said Alexander.

“Yes, yes,” said Mr Dyce. “All one wants in this world is the health—and a little more money. I was just thinking—” He stopped himself, hummed a bar of melody, and twinkled through his spectacles. “You’ll have read Dickens?” said he.

“I was familiar with his works when I was young,” said Alexander, like a man confessing that in youth he played at bools. “They were not bad.”

“Just so! Well, do you know there was an idea came to my mind just now that’s too clearly the consequence of reading Dickens for a week back, so I’ll hold my hand and keep my project for another early occasion when it won’t be Dickens that’s dictating.”

He went early back that day, to relieve Ailie at her nursing, as he pretended to himself, but really for his own delight in looking at the life in eyes where yesterday was a cloud. A new, fresh, wholesome air seemed to fill the house. Bud lay on high pillows, with Miss Minto’s Grace propped against her knees, and the garret was full of the odour of flowers that had come in a glorious bunch from the banker’s garden. Bell had grown miraculously young again, and from between Ailie’s eyebrows had disappeared the two black lines that had come there when Dr Brash had dropped in her ear the dreadful word pneumonia. But Dr Brash had beaten it! Oh, if she only knew the way to knit a winter waistcoat for him!

The child put out her hand to her uncle, and he kissed her on the palm, frightful even yet of putting a lip to her cheek, lest he should experience again the terror of the hot breath from that consuming inward fire.

“Well,” said he briskly, “how’s our health, your ladyship? Losh bless me! what a fine, big, sonsy baby you have gotten here; poor Alibel’s nose will be out of joint, I’m thinking.”

“Hasn’t got any,” said Bud, still weakly, in her new, thin, and unpractised voice, as she turned with a look that showed no lessening affection for the old doll, badly battered in the visage and wanting in the limbs, which lay beside her on the pillow.

“Blythmeat and breadberry,” said Daniel Dyce. “In the house of Daniel Dyce! Bell and Ailie, here’s an example for you!”