Suddenly all the town began to talk of the pride of Kate MacNeill. She took to wearing all her best on week-days; abandoned the kitchen window, and ruined an old-established trade in pay-night sweeties, that used to shower on her in threepenny packets at the start of every autumn when the days grew short. No longer blate young lads scraped with their feet uneasily in the sawdust of P. & A MacGlashan’s, swithering between the genteel attractions of Turkish Delight and the eloquence of conversation lozenges, that saved a lot of thinking, and made the blatest equal with the boldest when it came to tender badinage below the lamp at the back-door close with Dyce’s maid. Talk about the repartee of salons! wit moves deliberately there compared with the swift giff-gaff that Kate and her lads were used to maintain with sentiments doubly sweet and ready-made at threepence the quarter-pound. So fast the sweeties passed, like the thrust and riposte of rapiers, that their final purpose was forgotten; they were sweeties no longer to be eaten, but scented billets-doux, laconic of course, but otherwise just as satisfactory as those that high-born maidens get only one at a time and at long intervals when their papas are out at business.

“Are you engaged?”

“Just keep spierin’.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“You are a gay deceiver.”

“My heart is yours.”

“How are your poor feet?”By the hour could Kate sustain such sparkling flirtations, or at least till a “Kiss me, dearest” turned up from the bottom of the poke, and then she slapped his face for him. It is the only answer out in Colonsay unless he’s your intended.

But it stopped all at once. P. & A. was beat to understand what way his pay-night drawings fell, until he saw that all the lads were taking the other side of the street. “That’s her off, anyway!” said he to Mrs P. & A., with a gloomy visage. “I wonder who’s the lucky man? It’s maybe Peter,—she’ll no’ get mony losengers from him.”

And it was not only the decline in votive offerings that showed the vital change; she was not at the Masons’ ball, which shows how wrong was the thought of P. & A., for Peter was there with another lady. Very cheery, too; exceedingly cheery, ah, desperately gay, but quite beyond the comprehension of his partner, Jenny Shand, who was unable to fathom why a spirit so merry in the hall should turn to groans and bitterness when, feeling a faintish turn, she got him in behind the draft-screen on the landing of the stair to sit the “Flowers o’ Edinburgh.” He was fidging fain to tell her plainly what he thought of all her sex, but strove like a perfect gentleman against the inclination, and only said “Ha! ha! do you say so, noo?” and “Weemen!” with a voice that made them all out nothing more nor less than vipers. Poor Jenny Shand! bonny Jenny Shand! what a shame she should be bothered with so ill-faured a fellow! When she was picking bits of nothing off his coat lapel, as if he was her married man, and then coming to herself with a pretty start and begging pardon for her liberty, the diffy paid no heed; his mind was down the town, and he was seeing himself yesterday morning at the first delivery getting the window of Dyce’s kitchen banged in his face when he started to talk about soap, meaning to work the topic round to hands and gloves. He had got the length of dirty hands, and asked the size of hers, when bang! the window went, and the Hielan’ one in among her pots and pans.

It was not any wonder, for other lads as deliberate and gawky as himself had bothered her all the week with the same demand. Hands! hands! you would think, said she, they were all at the door wi’ a bunch of finger-rings bound to marry her right or wrong, even if they had to put them on her nose. Of course she knew finely what they were after—she knew that each blate wooer wanted a partner for the ball, and could only clench the compact with a pair of gloves; but just at present she was not in trim for balls, and landsmen had no interest for her since her heart was on the brine. Some of them boldly guessed at seven-and-a-halfs without inquiry, and were dumfoundered that she would not look at them; and one had acquired a pair of roomy white cotton ones with elastic round the top—a kind of glove that plays a solemn part at burials, having come upon Miss Minto when her stock of festive kids was done. They waylaid Kate coming with her basket from the mangle—no, thanky, she was needing no assistance; or she would find them scratching at the window after dark; or hear them whistling, whistling, whistling—oh, so softly!—in the close. There are women rich and nobly born who think that they are fortunate, and yet, poor dears! they never heard the whistling in the close. Kate’s case was terrible! By day, in her walks abroad in her new merino, not standing so much as a wink, or paying any heed to a “Hey, Kate, what’s your hurry?” she would blast them with a flashing eye. By night, hearing their signals, she showed them what she thought of them by putting to the shutters. “Dir-r-rt!” was what she called them, with her nose held high and every “r” a rattle on the lug for them—this to Bud, who could not understand the new distaste Kate had to the other sex. “Just dirt below my feet! I think myself far far above them.”One evening Mr Dyce came in from his office and quizzed her in the lobby. “Kate,” said he, “I’m not complaining, but I wish you would have mercy on my back-door. There’s not a night I have come home of late but if I look up the close I find a lad or two trying to bite his way into you through the door. Can you no’ go out, like a good lass, and talk at them in the Gaelic—it would serve them right! If you don’t, steps will have to be taken with a strong hand, as you say yourself. What are they wanting? Bless my soul! can this—can this be love?”

She ran to the sanctuary of the kitchen, plumped in a chair, and was swept away in a storm of laughter and tears that frightened Bud, who waited there a return of her aunts from the Women’s Guild. “Why, Kate, what’s the matter?” she asked.

“Your un—your un—un—uncle’s blaming me for harbouring all them chaps about the door, and says it’s l-l—love: oh dear! I’m black affronted.”

“You needn’t go into hysterics about a little thing like that,” said Bud; “Uncle Dan’s tickled to death to see so many beaux you have, wanting you to that ball; he said last night he had to walk between so many of them waiting for you there in front, it was like shassaying up the middle in the Haymakers.”

“It’s not hysterics, nor hersterics either,” said the maid; “and oh, I wish I was out of here and back in the isle of Colonsay!”

Yes, Colonsay became a great place then. America, where the prospects for domestics used to be so fascinating, had lost its glamour since Bud had told her the servants there were as discontented as in Scotland, and now her native isle beat Paradise. She would talk by the hour, at a washing, of its charms, of which the greatest seemed to be the absence of public lamps and the way you heard the wind! Colonsay seemed to be a place where folk were always happy, meeting in each other’s houses, dancing, singing, courting, marrying, getting money every now and then from sons or wealthy cousins in Australia. Bud wondered if they never did any work in Colonsay. Yes, yes, indeed! Kate could assure her, they worked quite often out in Colonsay—in the winter time.

But one thing greatly troubled her—she must write back at once to the only Charles, who so marvellously had come to her through Bud’s unconscious offices, and she knew she could never sustain the standard of hand-write, spelling, and information Bud had established in her first epistle. Her position was lamentable. It was all very well to be the haughty madam on the street, and show herself a wise-like modest gyurl, but what was that without the education? C. Maclean was a man of education—he got it on the yats among the gentry, he had travelled all the world!

Kate’s new airs, that caused such speculation in the town, were—now let me tell you—all the result of a dash at education. She wanted to be able to write a letter as good as Bud in a week or two, and had engaged the child to tutor her.

Bud never found a more delicious game in all her life, and it hurried her convalescence, for to play it properly she must be Aunt Ailie, and Aunt Ailie was always so strong and well.

“Education,” said Bud, who had a marvellous memory, and was now, you will notice, Ailie Dyce, sitting on a high chair, with the maid on a stool before her,—“education is not what a lot of sillies think it is; it isn’t knowing everything. Lots try for it that way, and if they don’t die young, just when they’re going to win the bursary, they grow up horrid bores, that nobody asks to picnics. You can’t know everything, not if you sit up cramming till the cows come home; and if you want to see a brainy person jump, ask him how his mother raised her dough. Miss Katherine MacNeill, never—NEVER—NEVER be ashamed of not knowing a thing, but always be ashamed of not wanting to know. That’s Part One. Don’t you think you should have an exercise-book, child, and take it down?”

“Toots! what’s my head for?” said the servant

“Uncle Dan says education is knowing what you don’t know, and knowing where to find it out without the other people knowing; but he says in most places you can get the name of having it fine and good by talking loud and pushing all your goods in front of you in a big enough barrow. And Auntie Bell—she says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and the rest of it is what she skipped at Barbara Mushet’s Seminary. But I tell you, child (said the echo of Ailie Dyce), that education’s just another name for love.”

“My stars! I never knew that before,” cried the servant; “I’m awful glad about Charles!”

“It isn’t that kind of love,” Bud hurriedly explained, “though it’s good enough, for that’s too easy. You’re only on the trail for education when you love things so you’ve simply got to learn as much as is good for your health about them. Everything’s sweet—oh, so sweet—all the different countries, and the different people, when you understand, and the woods, and the things in them, and all the animals,—’cepting maybe puddocks, though it’s likely God made them too when He was kind of careless,—and the stars, and the things men did, and women,—’specially those that’s dead, poor dears!—and all the books, ’cepting the stupid ones Aunt Ailie simply can’t stand, though she never lets on to the ladies who like that kind.”

“My Lord! must you love them all?” asked the maid, astonished.

“Yes, you must, my Lord,” said Bud. “You’ll never know the least thing well in this world unless you love it. It’s sometimes mighty hard, I allow. I hated the multiplication table, but now I love it—at least, I kind of love it up to seven times nine, and then it’s almost horrid, but not so horrid as it was before I knew that I would never have got to this place from Chicago unless a lot of men had learned the table up as far as twelve times twelve.”

“I’m not particular about the multiplication table,” said the maid, “but I want to be truly refined, the same as you said in yon letter to Charles. I know he’ll be expecting it.”

“H-m-m-m-m!” said Bud thoughtfully, “I s’pose I’ll have to ask Auntie Ailie about that, for I declare to goodness I don’t know where you get it, for it’s not in any of the books I’ve seen. She says it’s the One Thing in a lady, and it grows inside you someway, like—like—like your lungs, I guess. It’s no use trying to stick it on outside with lessons on the piano or the mandoline, and parlour talk about poetry, and speaking mim as if you had a clothes-pin in your mouth, and couldn’t say the least wee thing funny without it was a bit you’d see in ‘Life and Work.’ Refinement, some folk think, is not laughing right out.”

“My stars!” said Kate.

“And Auntie Bell says a lot think it’s not knowing any Scotch language and pretending you never took a tousy tea.”

“I think,” said Kate, “we’ll never mind refining; it’s an awful bother.”

“But every lady must be refined,” said Bud. “Ailie prosists in that.”

“I don’t care,” said the maid; “I’m not particular about being very much of a lady,—I’ll maybe never have the jewellery for it,—but I would like to be a sort of lady on the Sundays, when Charles is at home. I’m not hurryin’ you, my dear, but—but when do we start the writin’?” and she yawned in a way that said little for the interest of Professor Bud’s opening lecture.

Whereupon Bud explained that in a systematic course of education reading came first, and the best reading was Shakespeare, who was truly ennobling to the human mind. She brought in Auntie Ailie’s Shakespeare, and sat upon the fender, and plunged Kate at once into some queer society at Elsinore. But, bless you! nothing came of it: Kate fell asleep, and woke to find the fire cold and the child entranced with Hamlet.

“Oh dear! it’s a slow job getting your education,” she said pitifully, “and all this time there’s my dear Charles waiting for a letter!”