CHAPTER XXXI

FORTUNATELY Kate's marriage came to distract them for a while from the thought of Bud's future. The essential house had been found that was suitable for a captain, yet not too dearly rented—a piece of luck in a community where dwellings are rarely vacant, and every tenant over eighty years of age has the uneasy consciousness that half a dozen pairs betrothed have already decided upon a different color of paint for his windows, and have become resigned, with a not unpleasing melancholy, to the thought that in the course of nature his time cannot be long.

The Captain—that once roving eagle-heart subdued by love for the maid of Colonsay—so persistently discouraged any yachting trips which took theWavefor more than a night or two from her moorings that Lady Anne and her husband, knowing the heart themselves, recommended immediate marriage; and Miss Bell, in consequence, was scouring the country-side for Kate's successor in the kitchen, but hopeless of coming on one who could cook good kale, have a cheery face, and be a strict communicant. “I can get fine cooks that are wanting in the grace of God, and pious girls who couldn't be trusted to bake a Christian scone,” she said; “it's a choice between two evils.”

“Of two evils choose the third, then,” said Dan to his sister, flushed and exhilarated by a search that, for elderly maiden ladies, makes up for an older hunt. “The sport's agreeing with you.”

It was a great distress to Bud that the wedding should take place in the house and not in church, as seemed most fitting. She felt a private ceremony deprived her of a spectacle, with Miss Amelia Duff playing the wedding march on the harmonium, and the audience filing up the aisle in their Sunday clothes, the carriage of their hats revealing character.

“Why, you're simply going to make it look like a plain tea!” she protested. “If it was my marriage, Kate, I'd have it as solemn and grand as Harvest Sunday. A body doesn't get married to a man in brass buttons every other day, and it's a chance for style.”

“We never have our weddings in the church,” said Kate. “Sometimes the gentry do, but it's not considered nice; it's kind of Roman Catholic. Forbye, in a church, where would you get the fun?”

If Bud hadn't realized that fun was the main thing at Scottish weddings, she got hints of it in Kate's preparation. Croodles and hysterics took possession of the bride: she was sure she would never get through the ceremony with her life, or she would certainly do something silly that would make the whole world laugh at her and dreadfully vex the Captain. Even her wedding-dress, whose prospect had filled her dreams with gladness, but deepened her depression when it came from the manteau-maker's—she wept sad stains on the front width, and the orange-blossom they rehearsed with might have been a wreath of the bitter rue. Bud wanted her to try the dress on, but the bride was aghast at such an unlucky proposition; so she tried it on herself, with sweet results, if one did not look at the gathers in the back. They practised the ceremony the night before, Kate's sister from Colonsay (who was to be her bridesmaid) playing the part of a tall, brass-buttoned bridegroom.

“Oh, Kate!” cried Bud, pitifully, “you stand there like's you were a soda-water bottle and the cork lost. My goodness! brisk up a bit; if it's hard on you, just remember it isn't much of a joke for Charles. Don't you know the eyes of the public are on you?”

“That's just it,” said poor Kate. “I wouldn't be frightened a bit if it wasn't for that, for I'm so brave. What do you do with your hands?”

“You just keep hold of them. Mercy! don't let them hang like that; they're yours; up till now he's got nothing to do with them. Now for the tears—where's your handkerchief? That one's yards too big, and there isn't an edge of lace to peek through, but it 'll do this time. It 'll all be right on the night. Now the minister's speaking, and you're looking down at the carpet and you're timid and fluttered and nervous, and thinking what an epoch this is in your sinful life, and how you won't be Kate MacNeill any more but Mrs. Charles Maclean, and the Lord knows if you will be happy with him—”

The bride blubbered and threw her apron over her head as usual. Bud was in despair.

“Well, you are a silly!” she exclaimed. “All you want is a gentle tear or two trickling down the side of your nose, enough to make your eyes blink but not enough to soak your veil or leave streaks. And there you gush like a water-spout, and damp your face so much the bridegroom 'll catch his death of cold when he kisses you. Stop it, Kate MacNeill, it isn't anybody's funeral. Why, weddings aren't so very fatal; lots of folk get over them—leastways in America.”

“I can't help it!” protested the weeping maid. “I never could be melancholy in moderation, and the way you speak you make me think it's running a dreadful risk to marry anybody.”

“Well,” said Bud, “you needn't think of things so harrowing, I suppose. Just squeeze your eyes together and bite your lip, and perhaps it 'll start a tear; if it don't, it 'll look like as if you were bravely struggling with emotion. And then there's the proud, glad smile as you back out on Charles's arm—give her your arm, Minnie—the trial's over, you know, and you've got on a lovely new plain ring, and all the other girls are envious, and Charles Maclean and you are one till death do you part. Oh, Kate, Kate! don't grin; that's not a smile, it's a—it's a railroad track. Look!” Bud assumed a smile that spoke of gladness and humility, confidence and a maiden's fears, a smile that appealed and charmed.

“I couldn't smile like that to save my life,” said Kate, in a despair. “I wish you had learned me that instead of the height of Popacatthekettle. Do you think he'll be angry if I don't do them things properly?”

“Who? Charles! Why, Charles 'll be so mortally scared himself he wouldn't notice if you made faces at him or were a different girl altogether. He'll have a dull, dead booming in his ears, and wonder whether it's wedding-day or apple-custard—all of them I've seen married looked like that. It's not for Charles you should weep and smile; it's for the front of the house, you know, it's for the people looking on.”

“Toots!” said Kate, relieved. “If it's only for them, I needn't bother. I thought that maybe it was something truly refined that he would be expecting. It's not—it's not the front of a house I'm marrying. Tell me this and tell me no more—is there anything special I should do to please my Charles?”

“I don't think I'd worry,” said Bud, on reflection. “I dare say it's better not to think of anything dramatic. If I were you I'd just keep calm as grass, and pray the Lord to give me a good, contented mind and hurry up the clergyman.”

But yet was the maiden full of a consciousness of imperfection, since she had seen that day the bride's-cake on view in the baker's window—an edifice of art so splendid that she felt she could never be worthy of it. “How do you think I'll look?” she asked. And Bud assured her she would look magnificently lovely.

“Oh, I wish I did,” she sighed. “But I'm feared I'll not look so lovely as I think I do.”

“No girl ever did,” said Bud. “That's impossible. But when Charles comes to and sits up he'll think you're It; he'll think you perfect.”

“Indeed, I'm far from that,” said Kate. “I have just my health and napery and a liking for the chap, and I wish I wasn't near so red.”

Bud was able to instruct her in the right deportment for a bride, but had no experience in the management of husbands; for that Kate had to take some hints from her mistress, who was under the delusion that her brother Dan was the standard of his sex.

“They're curious creatures,” Bell confided. “You must have patience, ay, and humor them. They'll trot at your heels like pussy for a cheese-pudding, but they'll not be driven. If I had a man I would never thwart him. If he was out of temper or unreasonable I would tell him he was looking ill, and that would make him feared and humble. When a man thinks he's ill, his trust must be in the Lord and in his womankind. That's where we have the upper hand of them! First and last the thing's to be agreeable. You'll find he'll never put anything in its proper place, and that's a heartbreak, but it's not so bad as if he broke the dishes and blackened your eyes, the way they do in the newspapers. There's one thing that's the secret of a happy home—to live in the fear of God and within your income; faith! you can't live very well without it.”

“Oh, m'em! it's a desperate thing a wedding,” said the maid. “I never in all my life had so much to think about before.”

There were stricken lads in these days! The more imminent became her utter loss, the more desirable Kate became; but sentiment in country towns is an accommodating thing, and all the old suitors—the whistlers in the close and purveyors of conversation lozenges—found consolation in the fun at the wedding, and danced their griefs away on the flags of the Dyces' kitchen.

A noble wedding! All the cookery skill of Kate and her mistress was expended on it, and discretion, for the sake of the incredulous, forbids enumeration of the roasted hens. Chanticleers in the town crowed roupily and ruefully for months thereafter. The bridegroom might have stepped over the wall to the wedding chamber or walked to it in a hundred paces up the lane; he rode instead in a carriage that made a stately and circuitous approach round John Turner's corner, and wished the distance had been twenty times as long. “It's not that I'm feared,” said he, “or that I've rued the gyurl, but—but it's kind of sudden!”—a curious estimate of a courtship that had started in the burial-ground of Colonsay so many years before!

A noble wedding!—its revelry kept the town awake till morning; from the open windows the night was filled with dancing times and songs and laughter; boys cried “Fab, fab!” in the street, and a fairy lady—really a lady all grown up, alas!—stood at a window and showered pence among them.

Long before the wedding party ended, Bud went up to bed, but she lay for hours awake in the camceil-room hearing the revelry of the kitchen. She had said goodbye to the blissful pair whose wedding was the consequence of her own daft pranks as letter-writer; she would miss the maid of Colonsay. The knowledge that 'tis an uncertain world, a place of change and partings, comes to us all sooner or later in one flash of apprehension and of grief; for the first time Bud felt the irrevocable nature of the past, and that her happy world under this roof was, someway, crumbling, and the tears came to her eyes.

A hurried footstep sounded on the stairs, a rap came to the door, and the bride came in, unbidrin the darkness, whispering Lennox's name.

Her only answer was a sob from the girl in bed.

“Miss Lennox!” said the bride, distressed, “what ails you? I've come up to say good-bye; it wasn't a right good-bye at all with yon folk looking. Oh, Lennox, Lennox!ghaol mo chridhe!my heart is sore to be leaving you, for the two of us were so merry! Now I have a man, and a good man, too; it was you that gave me him, but I have lost my loving friend.” She threw herself on the bed, regardless of her finery, and the Celtic fount of her swelled over in sobs and tears.

IT took two maids to fill Kate's place in the Dyces' household—one for the plain boiling of potatoes and the other for her pious atmosphere, as the lawyer argued, and a period of discomfort attended on what Bell called their breaking in. No more kitchen nights for Lennox, now that she was a finished young lady and her friend was gone; she must sit in the parlor strumming canzonets on Grandma Buntain's Broadwood, taming her heart of fire. It was as a voice from Heaven's lift there came one day a letter from London in which Mrs. Molyneux invited her and one of her aunts for an Easter holiday.

“Indeed and I'll be glad to be quit for a week or two of both of you,” said Bell to her niece and Ailie. “Spring cleaning, with a couple of stupid huzzies in the kitchen—not but what they're nice and willing lassies—is like to be the sooner ended if we're left to it ourselves.”

A radiant visage and lips in firm control betrayed how Lennox felt. She had never been in London—its cry went pealing through her heart. Ailie said nothing, but marvelled how blithely and blindly her sister always set foot on the facile descent that led to her inevitable doom of deprivation and regret.

“The Grand Tour!” said Uncle Dan; “it's the fitting termination to your daft days, Lennox. Up by at the castle there's a chariot with imperials that conveyed the Earl on his, the hammer-cloth most lamentably faded. I often wonder if his lordship takes a sly seat in it at times when no one's looking, and climbs the Alps or clatters through Italian towns again when Jones the coachman is away at his tea. It's a thing I might do myself if I had made the Tour and still had the shandrydan.”

“Won't you really need me?” Aunt Ailie asked her sister, and half hoped, half feared spring cleaning should postpone the holiday, but Bell maintained it should be now or never, more particularly as Lennox's dress was new.

Oh, London, London! siren town! how it bewitched the girl! Its cab-horse bells were fairy; its evening, as they entered, hung with a myriad magic moons and stars. The far-stretching streets with their flaming jewel windows, the temples in the upper dusk, and the solemn squares crowding round country trees; the throngs of people, the odors of fruit-shops, the passion of flowers, the mornings silvery gray, and the multitudinous monuments rimed by years, thunder of hoofs in ways without end, and the silence of mighty parks—Bud lay awake in the nights to think of them.

Jim Molyneux had the siren by the throat: he loved her and shook a living out of her hands. At first she had seemed to him too old, too calm, too slow and stately as compared with his own Chicago, nor did she seem to have a place for any stranger; now he had found she could be bullied, that a loud voice, a bold front, and the aid of a good tailor could compel her to disgorge respect and gold. He had become the manager of a suburban theatre, where oranges were eaten in the stalls and the play was as often as not “The Father's Curse”; but once a day he walked past Thespian temples in the city, and, groaning at their mismanagement, planned an early future for himself with classic fronts of marble and duchesses advertising him each night by standing in rows on the pavement awaiting their carriages. Far along Grove Lane, where he dwelt in a pea-green house with nine French bean rows and some clumps of bulbs behind, one could distinguish his coming by the smartness of his walk and the gleam of the sunshine on his hat. He had one more secret of success—teetotalism. “Scotch and soda,” he would say, “that's what ails the boys, and makes 'em sleepier than Hank M'Cabe's old tomcat. Good boys, dear boys, they've always got the long-lost-brother grip, but they're mighty prone to dope assuagements for the all-gone feeling in the middle of the day. When they've got cobwebs in their little brilliantined belfries, I'm full of the songs of spring and merry old England's on the lee. See? I don't even need to grab; all I've got to do is to look deserving and the stuff comes crowding in; it always does to a man who looks like ready money and don't lunch on cocktails and cloves.”

“Jim, boyette,” his wife would say, “I guess you'd better put ice or something on your bump of self-esteem “—but she proudly wore the jewels that were the rewards of his confidence and industry.

Bud and Ailie, when they thought of home in these days, thought of it as a picture only, or as a chapter in a book covered in mouldy leather, with fs for s's. In their prayers alone were Dan and Bell real personages; and the far-off little town was no longer a woodcut, but an actual place blown through by the scented airs of forest and sea. Bell wrote them of rains and hails and misty weather; Grove Lane gardens breathed of daffodils, and the city gleamed under a constant sun. They came back to the pea-green house each day from rare adventuring, looking, in the words of Molyneux, as if they were fresh come off the farm, and the best seats in half a dozen theatres were at their disposal. “Too much of the playhouse altogether!” Bell wrote once, remonstrating. “Have you heard that man in the City Temple yet?”

In Molyneux's own theatre there was a break in the long succession of melodrama and musical comedy. He privately rejoiced that, for two ladies of such taste as Ailie and her niece, he could display a piece of the real legitimate—“King John”—though Camberwell was not very likely to make a week of Shakespeare profitable to his treasury. Ailie and Bud were to go on Tuesday; and Bud sat up at night to read an acting copy of “King John” till every character took flesh in her imagination, and the little iron balcony behind the pea-green house became the battlemented walls of Angiers, to whose postern came trumpeters of France.

They sat in the drawing-room, astonished at her speeches—

“'You men of Angiers, open wide your gates,And let young Arthur, Duke of Bretagne, in;Who, by the hand of France, this day hath madeMuch work for tears in many an English, mother.'”

or—

'"I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;My name is Constance; I am Geffrey's wife;Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost!'”

“Bravo, Bud!” would Molyneux cry, delighted. “Why, if I was an actor-manager, I'd pay you any salary you had the front to name. Ain't she just great, Millicent? I tell you, Miss Ailie, she puts the blinkers on Maude Adams, and sends Ellen 'way back in the standing room only. Girly, all you've got to learn is how to move. You mustn't stand two minutes in the same place on the stage, but cross 'most every cue.”

“I don't know,” said Bud, dubiously. “Why should folk have fidgets on a stage? They don't always have them in real life. I'd want to stand like a mountain—youknow, Auntie Ailie, the old hills at home!—and look so—so—so awful, the audience would shriek if I moved, the same as if I was going to fall on them.”

“Is that how you feel?” asked Jim Molyneux, curiously surveying her.

“Yes, that's how I feel,” said Bud, “when I've got the zip of poetry in me. I feel I'm all made up of burning words and eyes.”

“Child, you are very young!” said Mrs Molyneux.

“Yes,” said Bud, “I suppose that's it. By-and-by I'll maybe get to be like other people.”

Jim Molyneux struck the table with his open hand. “By George!” he cried; “I wouldn't hurry being like other people; that's what every gol-damed idiot in England's trying, and you're right on the spot just now as you stand. That's straight talk, nothing but! I allow I favor a bit of leg movement on the stage—generally it's about the only life there is on it—but a woman who can play with her head don't need to wear out much shoe-leather. Girly—” He stopped a second, then burst out with the question, “How'd you like a little part in this 'King John'?”

A flame went over the countenance of the girl, and then she grew exceedingly pale. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “Oh Jim Molyneux, don't be so cruel!”

“I mean it,” he said, “and I could fix it, for they've got an Arthur in the cast who's ill and bound to break down in a day or two if she had an understudy—and if I—Think you could play a boy's part? There isn't much to learn in Arthur, but that little speech of yours in front of Angiers makes me think you could make the part loom out enough to catch the eye of thecognoscenti.You'd let her, wouldn't you, Miss Ailie? It'd be great fun. She'd learn the lines in an hour or two, and a couple of nights of looking on would put her up to all the business. Now don't kick, Miss Ailie; say, Miss Ailie, have this little treat with us!”

Ailie's heart was leaping. Here was the crisis—she knew it—what was she to do? She had long anticipated some such hour, had often wrestled with the problem whether, when it came, the world should have her Bud without a struggle for the claims of Bell and the simple cloistered life of the Scottish home. While yet the crisis was in prospect only she could come to no conclusion; her own wild hungers as a girl, recalled one night in the light of kitchen candles, had never ceased to plead for freedom—for freedom and the space that herself had years ago surrendered—now it was the voice of the little elder sister, and the bell of Wanton Wully ringing at evening humble people home.

“Just this once!” pleaded Mr. Molyneux, understanding her scruples. Bud's face mutely pleaded.

Yes, “just this once!”—it was all very well, but Ailie knew the dangers of beginnings. It would not even be, in this case, a beginning; the beginning was years ago—before the mimicry on the first New Year's morning, before the night of the dozen candles or the creation of The Macintosh: the child had been carried onward like a feather in a stream.

“I really don't mind much myself,” said Ailie at last, “but I fancy her aunt Bell would scarcely like it.”

“Not if she knew I was going to do it,” said Lennox, quickly; “but when the thing was over she'd be as pleased as Punch—at least she'd laugh the way she did when we told her I was dressed as Grandma Buntain at the ball.”

The sound of Will Oliver's curfew died low in Ailie's mind, the countenance of Bell grew dim; she heard, instead, the clear young voice of Bud among the scenery and sat with an enraptured audience. “If you are all so anxious for it, then—” she said, and the deed was done!

She did not rue it when the night of Bud's performance came, and her niece as the hapless young Bretagne welcomed the dauphin before the city gates; she gloried in the natural poignancy that marked the painful scene with Hubert come to torture, but she almost rued it when Molyneux, having escorted them in an inexplicable silence home, broke out at last in fervent praise of his discovery as soon as the girl had left them for her bed.

“I've kept clutch of myself with considerable difficulty,” he said, “for I didn't want to spoil girly's sleep or swell her head, but I want to tell you, Millicent, and you, Miss Ailie, thatI've Found my Star!Why, say, she's out of sight! She was the only actor in all that company to-night who didn't know she was in Camberwell; she was right in the middle of mediaeval France from start to finish, and when she was picked up dead at the end of the fourth act she was so stone-cold and stiff with thinking it she scared the company. I suspect, Miss Ailie, that you're going to lose that girl!”

IT was a wet night in November. With a chuckle of horse's hoofs on shining streets, Dan Dyce, with Bell and Ailie, drove from Molyneux's fine new home to the temple of his former dreams—the proud Imperial. They sat in silence in the darkness of the cab, and in silence drifted into the entrance hall of the theatre to mingle with the pompous world incongruously—with loud, vainglorious men, who bore to the eye of Bell some spirit of abandonment and mockery, with women lovely by the gift of God, or with dead-white faces, wax-red lips, and stealthy, sidelong eyes. One there was who, passing before them, released a great fur cloak from her shoulders with a sudden movement, and, as it slowly slipped down her marble back, threatened an utter nakedness that made Bell gasp and clutch at her sister's arm.

“Look!” said Ailie, eagerly. Before them was a portrait of a woman in the dress of Desdemona. The face had some suggestion that at times it might be childlike and serene, but had been caught in a moment of alarm and fire, and the full black eyes held in their orbs some frightful apprehension, the slightly parted lips expressed a soul's mute cry.

“What is it? Who is it?” asked Bell, pausing before the picture with a stound of fear.

“It is Bud,” said Ailie, feeling proud and sorrowful—for why she could not tell. “There is the name—'Winifred Wallace'.”

Bell wrung her hands in the shelter of her mantle and stood bewildered, searching for the well-known lineaments.

“Let us go up,” said Dan, softly, with no heed for the jostling people, forever self-possessed, sorrowful to guess at his sister's mind.

“Yes, yes; let us go up out of this crowd,” said Ailie, but the little woman hung before the portrait fascinated. Round her washed the waves of rustling garments like a surf on the shore at home; scents wafted; English voices, almost foreign in their accent, fell upon her ear all unnoticed since she faced the sudden revelation of what her brother's child, her darling, had become. Seekers of pleasure, killers of wholesome cares, froth of the idle world eddied around her chattering, laughing, glancing curious or contemptuous at her gray, sweet face, her homely form, her simple Sabbath garments; all her heart cried out in supplication for the child that had too soon become a woman and wandered from the sanctuary of home.

“We are blocking the way here, Bell. Let us go up,” again said Ailie, gently taking her arm.

“Yes,” said her brother. “It's not a time for contemplation of the tombs; it's not the kirkyard, Bell. You see there are many that are anxious to get in.”

“Oh, Lennox, Lennox!” she exclaimed, indifferent to the strangers round about her, “my brother's child! I wish—oh, I wish ye were at home! God grant ye grace and wisdom—'then shalt thou walk in thy way safely, and thy foot shall not stumble. When thou liest down thou shalt not be afraid; yea, thou shalt lie down and thy sleep shall be sweet.'”

They went up to the box that Molyneux had kept for them, to find his wife there nursing an enormous bouquet of flowers, all white as the driven snow. “A gorgeous house!” she told them. “Everybody that's anybody, and in the front push. Half a hundred critics, two real Count Vons, a lot of benzine-brougham people who never miss a first night. There are their wives, poor dears! shining same as they were Tiffany's windows. My! ain't our Bud going to have a happy night!”

They sat and looked for a while in silence at the scene before them, so pleasing to the mind that sought in crowds, in light and warmth and gayety, its happiest associations, so wanting in the great eternal calm and harmony that are out-of-doors in country places. Serpent eyes in facets of gems on women's bosoms; heads made monstrous yet someway beautiful and tempting by the barber's art; shoulders bare and bleached, devoid of lustre; others blushing as if Eve's sudden apprehension had survived the generations. Sleek, shaven faces, linen breastplates, opera-glasses, flowers, fans, a murmur of voices, and the flame over all of the enormous electrolier.

It was the first time Bell had seen a theatre. Her first thought was one of blame and pity. “'He looked on the city and wept'!” said she. “Oh, Ailie, that it were over and we were home!”

“All to see Miss Winifred Wallace!” said Mrs. Molyneux. “Think of that, Miss Dyce—your darling niece, and she'll be so proud and happy!”

Bell sighed. “At least she had got her own way, and I am a foolish old countrywoman who had different plans.”

Dan said nothing. Ailie waited, too, silent, in a feverish expectation, and from the fiddles rose a sudden melody. It seemed the only wise and sober thing in all that humming hive of gaudy insects passing, passing, passing. It gave a voice to human longings for a nobler, better world; and in it, too, were memory and tears. To the people in the box it seemed to tell Bud's story—opening in calm, sweet passages, closing in the roll of trumpet and the throb of drum. And then the lights went down and the curtain rose upon the street in Venice.

The early scenes were dumb and vacant, wanting Bud's presence; there was no play for them till she came slowly into the council chamber where sat the senators, timidity and courage struggling in her port and visage.

“No, no; it is not Bud,” Bell whispered. “It is not our lassie; this one is too tall and—and too deliberate. I fear she has not dared it at the last, or that she has been found unsuitable.”

Ailie leaned forward, quivering, feeding her eyes. “It's no one else,” said she. “Dear Bud,ourBud! Those two years' training may have made her some-ways different, but she has not changed her smile. Oh, I am so proud, and sure of her! Hus-s-sh!”

“'... I do perceive here a divided duty;To you I am bound for life and education,My life and education both do learn meHow to respect you; you are the lord of duty,I am hitherto your daughter: but here's my husband.'”

Desdemona's first speech broke the stillness that had fallen on the house; her face was pale, they saw the rapid heaving of her bosom, they heard a moment's tremor in her voice matured and wonderful, sweet as a silver bell. To the box where she knew her friends were sitting she let her eyes for a second wander as she spoke the opening lines that had so much of double meaning—not Desdemona, but the loving and wilful child asking forgiveness, yet tenacious of her purpose.

To Ailie came relief and happiness and pride; Dan held a watching brief for his elder sister's prejudices and his own philosophy. Bell sat in tears which Shakespeare did not influence. When next she saw the stage with unblurred eyes Desdemona was leaving with the Moor.

“My dears,” said Mrs. Molyneux, “as Desdemona she's the Only One! and Jim was right. It's worth a thousand times more trouble than he took with her. He said all along she'd dazzle them, and I guess her fortune's made, and it's going to be the making of this house, too. I feel so proud and happy I'd kiss you right here, Mr. Dyce, if it wouldn't mess up my bouquet.”

“A black man!” said Bell, regretfully. “I know it is only paint, of course, but—but I never met him; I do not even know his name.”

It seemed as if the play had nothing in it but the words and acts of Desdemona. At each appearance she became more confident, charged the part with deeper feeling, found new meaning in the time-worn words. Even Bell began to lose her private judgment, forget that it was nothing but a sinful play, and feel some pity for Othello; but, as the knavish coils closed round her Desdemona, the strain became unbearable.

“Oh! I cannot stand it any longer,” she exclaimed, when the voice of Lennox quavered in the song before her last good-night, and, saying so, pushed back her seat into the shadows of the box, covering her ears with her fingers. She saw no more; she heard no more till the audience rose to its feet with thunders of applause that swelled and sank and swelled again as if it would never end. Then she dared to look, and saw a trembling Desdemona all alone before a curtain bowing.

“What is the matter? What is the matter? Why are they crying that way on her?” she asked, dum-founded.

“Why, don't you see they're mad!” said Mrs. Molyneux.

“Oh, dear! and I thought she was doing splendidly.”

“Glad mad, I mean. She has carried them off their feet, and I'll bet Jim Molyneux is standing on his hands behind that drop and waving his legs in the air. Guess I needn't waste this bouquet on a girl who looks like the morning hour in Covent Garden.”

Molyneux burst into the box in a gust of wild excitement. “Come round, come round at once, she wants to see you,” he exclaimed, and led them deviously behind the scenes to her dressing-room.

She stood at the door, softly crying; she looked at them—the grave old uncle, Ailie who could understand, the little Auntie Bell—it was into the arms of Bell she threw herself!

THE talk of the whole of London! The beauteous Lady Anne herself's not in it with her!” said Will Oliver, scratching behind his ears. “Man, is it no' just desperate? But I'll warrant ye there's money in it, for it's yonder folk are willing to pay well for their diversion.”

“Are you sure,” said P. & A., “it's not another woman altogether? It gives the name of Wallace in the paper.”

The bellman, sitting on a soap-box, slapped his thigh and said: “I'm telling ye; I had it long ago from Kate MacNeill that her name on the stage was going to be Wallace—Winifred Wallace—and there it is in print. Tra—tragedienny, tragediennys are the head ones in the trade; I've seen them in the shows—tr-r-r-emen-dous women!”

The Provost, who had just stepped in to P. & A.'s for his Sunday sweeties, smiled tolerantly and passed his taddy-box. “Bud Dyce,” said he, “is never likely to be round this way in a caravan to do the deid-drap three times every night for front-seats sixpence. I doubt we have seen the last of her unless we have the money and the clothes for London theatres.”

“It's really her, then?” said the grocer.

“You can take Wull's word for that,” said the Provost, “and I have just been talking to her uncle. Her history's in the morning paper, and I'm the civic head of a town renowned for genius.”

Wanton Wully went out to drift along the street in the light of the bright shop windows before which bairns played “chaps me,” making choice of treasures for their gaudiness alone, like most of us, who should know better. He met George Jordon. “Geordie,” said he, “you'll have heard the latest? You should be in London; yon's the place for oddity,” and George, with misty comprehension, turned about for the road to London town. Out of the inn came Colin Cleland, hurried, in his hand the business-looking packet of tattered documents that were always his excuse for being there.

“Winifred Wallace—Great Tragedienny! It's a droll thing life, according to the way you look at it. Stirring times in London, Mr. Cleland! Changed her name to Wallace, having come of decent worthy, people.Weknow, but we'll not let on.”

“Not a word!” said Colin Cleland, comically. “Perhaps she may get better and the thing blow by. Are you under the impression that celebrity's a thing to be ashamed of? I tell you she's a credit to us all.”

“Lord bless me! do you say so?” asked Wull Oliver. “If I was a tragedienny I would be ashamed to show my face in the place again. We all expected something better from the wee one—she was such a caution! It was myself, as you might say, invented her; I gave her a start at devilment by letting her ring the New Year bell. After that she always called me Mr. Wanton, and kindly inquired at me about my legs. She was always quite the leddy.”

Miss Minto's shop was busy: a boy was in with a very red face demanding the remnants that by rights should have gone home with his mother's jacket, and the Misses Duff were buying chiffon.

“This is startling news about young Lennox Dyce,” remarked Miss Minto. “It's caused what you might call a stir. There's not a weekly paper to be had for love or money.”

“She was always most peculiar,” said Miss Jean. “Bizarre,” cooed Miss Amelia—it was her latest adjective.

“I was sure there was something special about in her since the very first day I saw her,” said the mantua-maker. “Yon eye, Miss Duff! And what a sweet and confident expression! I am so glad she has pleased them up in London; you never can depend on them. I am thinking of a novel blouse to mark in what I think will be a pleasing way the great occasion—the Winifred Wallace Waist I'm calling it. You remember the clever Mr. Molyneux.”

“I doubt we never understood her,” said Miss Jean. “But we make a feature now of elocution.”

“Not that we wish to turn out great tragediennes,” said Miss Amelia. “There's happiness in humbler vocations.”

“I dare say there is,” confessed Miss Minto. “I never thought of the stage myself; my gift was always dress-making, and you wouldn't believe the satisfaction that's in seeing a dress of mine on a woman who can do it justice. We have all our own bit art, and that's a wonderful consolation. But I'mveryglad at that girl's progress, for the sake of Mr. Dyce—and, of course, his sisters. Miss Ailie is transported, in the seventh heaven, and even her sister seems quite pleased. 'You'll have a high head to-day,' I said to her when she was passing from the coach this afternoon.”

“And what did she say to that?” inquired Miss Jean, with curiosity.

“You know Miss Dyce! She gave a smile and said, 'But a humble heart; it's the Dyces' motto.'”

The doctor put his paper down, having read the great news over several times with a singular satisfaction that surprised his sisters, who were beat to see much glory in a state of life that meant your name on every wall and the picture of your drawing-room every other week in 'Homely Notes.' Drawing on his boots, he took a turn the length of the lawyer's house.

“Faith! London has the luck of it,” he said, on entering. “I wish I was there myself to see this wonderful Desdemona. I hope you liked your jaunt, Miss Bell?”

“It wasn't bad,” said Bell, putting out the cards. “But, mercy on me, what a silly way they have of baking bread in England!—-all crust outside, though I grant it's sweet enough when you break into it.” “H'm!” said Dr. Brash, “I've seen Scotch folk a bit like that. She has rung the bell, I see; her name is made.”

“It is, they tell me,” answered Bell, “but I hope it will never change her nature.”

“She had aye a genius,” said Mr. Dyce, cutting the pack for partners.

“She had something better,” said Miss Ailie, “she had love”; and on the town broke forth the evening bell.

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