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He had been spoiled originally by being ten years younger than the next youngest in the family; and then, when the children had been shipped on to Aunt Mary’s tender mercies, Jack had won her heart immediately because she accidentally discovered that he had never been baptized, and so felt fully justified in re-naming him after her own father and having the name branded into him for keeps by her own religious apparatus.
It was late—quite midnight—for he and Aunt Mary’s new maid had talked long and freely ere they separated at last.
"You mark my words!" rasped Lucinda, shaking her finger in witchlike warning. Joshua laughed again. "Them laughs best what laughs last," said Aunt Mary’s handmaiden. She turned away, and then returned to give Joshua a look that proved that the peppery mistress had inculcated some cayenne into the souls of those about her.
"My heavens alive!" she sighed sweetly, "there’s nothin’ like home. Not anywhere—not nowhere!" The next date upon the little gold and ivory memorandum card which hung beside Aunt Mary’s watch was that set for Burnett’s picnic, but its dawning found both host and guest too much attached to their beds to desire any fêtes champêtre just then.
"But I can do one on the floor," she cried. Aunt Mary’s features became suffused with heavenly joy. "Oh, Granite!" she murmured, in accents of greatest anticipation. The maid stood up, and, going off as far as the limits of the spacious bedroom would allow, executed a most fetching and dainty pas seul to a tune of her own humming. "Give me suthin’ to pound with!" cried her enthusiastic audience.
Janice smiled pleasantly, and placing herself in the closest possible proximity with the ear trumpet, at once rendered the desired morceau in a style which would have done credit to a soloist in a café chantant. Aunt Mary’s lips wreathed in seraphic bliss. "My!" she said. "I feel just as if I was back eatin’ crabs’ legs and tails again.
Bothwell, he said, had imparted to him a scheme whereby they should seize Queen Mary’s person, and murder her secretary, Lethington, and her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, later Earl of Moray. Arran explained to Knox that, if ever the plot came to light, he would be involved in the crime of guilty concealment of foreknowledge of treason.
His words came true, and they finally did emerge from the seething mass and found a carriage, the door of which happened to be standing mysteriously open. Within, upon the small seat, some omniscient hands had already deposited Aunt Mary’s bags.
"Lucinda," her mistress said, after a few seconds had faded away unimproved, "seems to me I mentioned wantin’ Joshua to get down a trunk—seems to me I did." The maid turned and left the room. She felt more or less dazed. Nothing so startling as Aunt Mary’s wanting a trunk had happened in years. Disinheriting Jack was not in it by comparison.
From the general trend of this and other remarks of Joshua the reader will readily divine why he had been in Aunt Mary’s employ for thirty years, and had always been characterized by her as "a most sensible man," and anyone who had seen the alacrity with which the trunk was brought and the respectful attention with which Aunt Mary’s further commands were received would have been forced to coincide in her opinion.
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