For all the regrets of increasing age there is one alleviation among many, that days apart from those we love pass the quicker, even as our hurrying years. Thus it is that separations are divested of more and more of their terrors the nearer we are to that final parting which wipes out all, and is but the going to a great reunion. So the first fortnight, whereof Miss Bell thought to cheat the almanac under the delusion that Bud’s absence would then scarcely be appreciated, was in truth the period when she missed her most, and the girl was back for her Christmas holidays before half of her threepenny-bits for the plate were done.

It was worth a year of separation to see her come in at the door, rosy from the frosty air, with sparkling eyes and the old, sweet, rippling laugh, not—outside at least—an atom different from the girl who had gone away; and it made up to Bud herself for many evenings home-sick on an Edinburgh pillow to smell again the old celestial Christmas grocery and feel the warmth of her welcome.

Myself, I like to be important—not of such consequence to the world as to have it crick its neck with having to look up at me, but now and then important only to a few old friends; and Bud, likewise, could always enjoy the upper seat, if the others of her company were never below the salt. She basked in the flattery that Kate’s deportment gave to her dignity as a young lady educated at tremendous cost.

It was the daft days of her first coming over again; but this time she saw all with older eyes,—and, besides, the novelty of the little Scottish town was ended. Wanton Wully’s bell, pealing far beyond the burgh bounds,—commanding, like the very voice of God, to every ear of that community, no matter whether it rang at morn or eve,—gave her at once a crystal notion of the smallness of the place, not only in its bounds of stone and mortar, but in its interests, as compared with the city, where a thousand bells, canorous on the Sabbath, failed, it was said, to reach the ears of more than a fraction of the people. The bell, and John Taggart’s band on Hogmanay, and the little shops with windows falling back already on timid appeals, and the grey high tenements pierced by narrow entries, and the douce and decent humdrum folk,—she saw them with a more exacting vision, and Ailie laughed to hear them all summed up as “quaint.”

“I wondered when you would reach ‘quaint,’” said Auntie Ailie; “it was due some time ago, but this is a house where you never hear the word. Had you remained at the Pige— at the Misses Duff’s Seminary Miss Amelia would have had you sewing it on samplers, if samplers any longer were the fashion.”

“Is it not a nice word ‘quaint’?” asked Bud, who, in four months among critics less tolerant (and perhaps less wise) than the Dyces, had been compelled to rid herself of many transatlantic terms and phrases.

“There’s nothing wrong with ‘quaint,’ my dear,” said Miss Ailie; “it moves in the most exclusive circles: if I noticed it particularly, it is because it is the indication of a certain state of mind, and tells me where you stand in your education more clearly than your first quarterly report. I came home from school with ‘quaint’ myself: it not only seemed to save a lot of trouble by being a word which could be applied to anything not otherwise describable, but I cherished it because its use conferred on me a kind of inward glow of satisfaction like—like—like Aunt Bell’s home-made ginger-cordial. ‘Quaint,’ Bud, is the shibboleth of boarding-school culture: when you can use the word in the proper place, with a sense of superiority to the thing so designated, you are practically a young lady and the polish is taking on.”

“They all say it in our school,” explained Bud apologetically; “at least, all except The Macintosh,—I couldn’t think of her saying it somehow.”

“Who’s The Macintosh?” asked Ailie.

“Why! was there no Macintosh in your time?” exclaimed Bud. “I thought she went away back to the—to the Roman period. She’s the funniest old lady in the land, and comes twice a-week to teach us dancing and deportment. She’s taught them to mostly all the nobility and gentry of Scotland; she taught Lady Anne and all her brothers when they were in St Andrews.”

“I never heard of her,” said Ailie; “she must be—be—be decidedly quaint.”

“She’s so quaint you’d think she’d be kept in a corner cupboard with a bag of camphor at the back to scare the moths away. She’s a little wee mite, not any bigger than me—than I,—and they say she’s seventy years old, but sometimes she doesn’t look a day more than forty-five if it weren’t for her cap and her two front teeth missing. She’s got the loveliest fluffy silver hair—pure white, like Mrs Molyneux’s Aunt Tabitha’s Persian cat; cheeks like an apple, hands as young as yours, and when she walks across a room she glides like this, so you’d think she was a cutter yacht—”

Bud sailed across the parlour to represent the movement of The Macintosh with an action that made her aunties laugh, and the dog gave one short yelp of disapproval.

“That was the way that Grandma Buntain walked,—it used to be considered most genteel,” said Bell. “They trained girls up to do it with a back-board and a book on the top of the head; but it was out before my time; we just walked anyway in Barbara Mushet’s Seminary, where the main things were tambouring and the Catechism.”

“Miss Macintosh is a real lady,” Bud went on. “She’s got genuine old ancestors. They owned a Highland place called Kaims, and the lawyers have almost lawyered it a’ awa’ she says, so now she’s simply got to help make a living teaching dancing and deportment. I declare I don’t know what deportment is no more than the child unborn, unless it’s shutting the door behind you, walking into a room as if your head and your legs were your own, keeping your shoulders back, and being polite and kind to everybody, and I thought folks ’d do all that without attending classes, unless they were looney. Miss Macintosh says they are the sine qua non and principal branches for a well-bred young lady in these low days of clingy frocks and socialism; but the Principal she just smiles and gives us another big block of English history. Miss Macintosh doesn’t let on, but I know she simply can’t stand English history, for she tells us, spells between quadrilles, that there hasn’t been any history anywhere since the Union of the Parliaments, except the Rebellion of 1745. But she doesn’t call it a rebellion. She calls it ‘yon affair.’ She’s Scotch! I tell you, Auntie Bell, you’d love to meet her! I sit, and sit, and look at her like—like a cat. She wears spectacles, just a little clouded, only she doesn’t call them spectacles; she says they are preserves, and that her eyes are as good as anybody’s. They’re bright enough, I tell you, for over seventy.”

“Indeed I would like to see the creature!” exclaimed Miss Bell. “She must be an original! I’m sometimes just a trifle tired of the same old folk about me here,—I know them all so well, and all they’re like to do or say, that there’s nothing new or startling to be expected from them.”

“Would you like to see her?” said Bud quickly; “then—then, some day I’ll tell her, and I’ll bet she’ll come. She dresses queer—like a lady in the ‘School for Scandal,’ and wears long mittens like Miss Minto, and when our music-master, Herr Laurent, is round she makes goo-goo eyes at him fit to crack her glasses. ‘Oh, Hair-r-r!’ she says, sitting with her mitts in her lap,—‘oh, Hair-r-r! can you no’ give the young ladies wise-like Scotch sangs, instead o’ that dreich Concone?’ And sometimes she’ll hit him with a fan. He says she plays the piano to our dancing the same as it was a spinet.”

“I declare it beats all!” said Miss Bell. “Does the decent old body speak Scotch?”

“Sometimes. When she’s making goo-goo eyes at the Herr, or angry, or finding fault with us but doesn’t want to hurt our feelings.”

“I can understand that,” said Miss Bell, with a patriot’s fervour; “there’s nothing like the Scotch for any of them; I fall to it myself when I’m sentimental. And so does your Uncle Dan.”

“She says she’s the last of the real Macintoshes,—that all the rest you see on Edinburgh signboards are only incomers or poor de-degenerate cadets; and I guess the way she says it, being a de-degenerate cadet Macintosh must be the meanest thing under the cope and canopy. Heaps of those old ancestors of hers went out in the days of the clans, fighting for any royalty that happened along. She’s got all their hair in lockets, and makes out that when they disappeared Scotland got a pretty hard knock. I said to her once the same as Aunt Ailie says to you, Aunt Bell, ‘English and Scots, I s’pose we’re all God’s people, and it’s a terribly open little island to be quarrelling in, seeing all the Continent can hear us quite plain’; but she didn’t like it. She said it was easy seen I didn’t understand the dear old Highland mountains, where her great-great-grandfather, Big John of the Axe, could collect five hundred fighting-men if he wagged a fiery cross at them. ‘I have Big John’s blood in me!’ she said, quite white, and her head shaking so much her preserves nearly fell off her nose. ‘I’ve Big John’s blood in me; and when I think of things, I hate the very name o’ thae aboaminable English!’ ‘Why, you’ve never seen them, Miss Macintosh,’ I said—for I knew she’d never had a foot outside Scotland. ‘No,’ said she, quite sharp, ‘and I don’t want to; for they might be nice enough, and then I wad be bound to like them.’”

“Oh, Bell!” cried Ailie, laughing, “Miss Macintosh is surely your doppelganger.”

“I don’t know what a doppelganger is,” said Auntie Bell; “but she’s a real sensible body, and fine I would like to see her.”

“Then I’ll have to fix it somehow,” said Bud, with emphasis. “P’raps you’ll meet her when you come to Edinburgh—”

“I’m not there yet, my dear.”

“—Or she might be round this way by-and-by. She’d revel in this place; she’d maybe not call it quaint, but she’d find it pretty careless about being in the—in the modern rush she talks about, and that would make her happier than a letter from home. I believe The Macintosh—”

“Miss Macintosh, my dear,” said Bell reprovingly, and the girl reddened.

“I know,” said she. “It’s mean to talk of her same as she was a waterproof, and I often try not to, because I like her immensely; but it’s so common among the girls that I forget. I believe Miss Macintosh would love this place, and could stop in it for ever.”

“Couldn’t you?” asked Auntie Ailie slyly.

Bud hesitated. “Well, I—I like it,” said she. “I just love to lie awake nights and think about it, and I can hear the wind in the trees and the tide come in, and the bell, and the wild geese; and family worship at the Provost’s on Sunday nights, and I can almost be here, I think so powerfully about it; but—but—”

She stopped short, for she saw a look of pain in the face of her Auntie Bell.

“But what?” said the latter sharply.“Oh! I’m a wicked, cruel, ungrateful girl, Auntie Bell; and I ought to want to love this place so much, nobody could push me out of it. And I do love it; but I feel if I lived here always I’d not grow any more.”

“You’re big enough,” said Auntie Bell. “You’re as big as myself now.”

“I mean inside. Am I a prig, Aunt Ailie? I’d hate to be a prig! But I’d hate as bad to tell a lie; and I feel I’d never learn half so much or do half so much here as I’d do where thousands of folk were moving along in a procession, and I was with them too. A place like this is like a kindergarten—it’s good enough as far’s it goes, but it doesn’t teach the higher branches.”

Bell gazed at her in wonder and pity and blame, shaking her head. All this was what she had anticipated.

“I know the feeling,” said Aunt Ailie, “for I have shared it myself; and sometimes still it will come back to me, but in my better hours I think I’m wiser and can be content. If there is growth in you, you will grow anywhere. You were born in the noise of Chicago, Bud, and I suppose it’s hard to get it out of the ears. By-and-by I hope you’ll find that we are all of us most truly ourselves not in the crowd but when we are alone, and that not the smallest hamlet in the world need be intellectually narrow for any one with imagination, some books, and a cheerful constitution. Do you understand that, Bud?”

Bud thought hard for a moment and then shook her head. “It sounds as if it ought to be true,” said she, “and I daresay you think just now it is true; but I simply can’t believe it.” And all of them turned at the sound of a chuckling laugh, to find that Mr Dyce had heard this frank confession.

“That’s the worst of you, Bud,” said he. “You will never let older folk do your thinking for you.”