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The least possible flicker of disappointment passed over Baubie's face. The tangled head drooped for an instant, then she bobbed by way of adieu and vanished. That day and the next passed before Miss Mackenzie found it possible to pay her long-promised visit to Mr.
Baubie's countenance fell lower still on hearing this, and she blinked both eyes deprecatingly. Nevertheless, when the big girl whom they called Kate returned, bringing with her a warm whiff of steam and soap, she trotted after her obediently and silently. After a while the door opened, and Kate's yellow head appeared. "Speak with ye, mem?" she said. "I hae her washen noo, but what for claes?"
Baubie's eyes looked like those of a hare taken in a gin. Not one word had been said about her. She was not to go with her father. What was to become of her? She was not long left in doubt as to her fate. "I will take the child, sheriff," said Miss Mackenzie eagerly and anxiously. "I came here purposely to offer her a home in the refuge."
Gestures and looks convey, among people like the Wisharts, far more meaning than words, and Baubie's father perfectly understood from the manner and tone of her pregnant remark that she had run away from school, and had severed the connection between herself and the "kind leddy," and that in consequence the situation was highly risky for both.
Baubie's slim figure had caught the flat-backed, square-shoulder form of her little neighbor, and her face, between the smooth-laid bands of her hair, seemed to have assumed the same gravely-respectable air. The disingenuous roving eye was there all the time, could they but have noted it, and gave the lie to her compressed lips and studied pose.
The brown wincey and the coarse apron seemed to her the neophyte's robe, betokening Baubie's conversion from arab nomadism to respectability and from a vagabond trade to decorous industry. "Now, Baubie, you can knit: I mean to give you needles and worsted to knit yourself stockings. Won't that be nice? I am sure you never knitted stockings for yourself before."
Her eyes had red rims to them, caused by superfluous soap and water, and in its present barked condition, when all the dirt was gone, Baubie's face had rather an interesting, wistful expression. She seemed not to stand very steadily in her boots, which were much too big for her. Miss Mackenzie surveyed her with great satisfaction.
They passed through a large, low-ceilinged room into a smaller one, in which were only four beds: a small iron stretcher beside the window was pointed out as Baubie's. Miss Mackenzie turned down the red-knitted coverlet and looked at the blankets. They were perfectly clean, like everything else, and, like everything else too, very coarse and very well worn. "This will do very nicely.
And if the lassie Grant's excellences were somewhat obtrusively contrasted with Baubie's shortcomings, it was because, the two children being of the same age, Mrs. Duncan hoped to rouse thereby a spark of emulation in Baubie. Neither was there any pharisaical self-exaltation on the part of the rival.
Though there was but little attraction for her in the room, she was about to leave the window when her eye fell on a large black cat crouched on the wall, employed in surveillance of the linen or stalking sparrows or in deadly ambush for a hated rival. Meeting Baubie's glance, he sat up and stared at her suspiciously with a pair of round yellow, unwinking orbs.
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