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"Oh, Angus," I said, breathlessly, "there's Arthur's Seat, and the palaces, and the galleries and gardens, it'll be quite as good as the moors; there'll be no Miss Dunreddin, and you can stay here all the leelang simmer's day!" He smiled, as he answered, "And I suppose those scarlet signals at the fore signify" "Nothing!" "Fast colors, I see."
To-morrow night I'll come and take you to the play, Miss Dunreddin or no Miss Dunreddin. But sing to me first. It's a weary while since I used to hear that voice crooning itself to sleep across the hall with little songs." So I sang the song he chose, "My love, she's but a lassie yet"; and he took the bunch of bluebells from my braids, and was gone. The next night Angus was as good as his word.
'T was no use his waiting, though he lingered still a day or two in hopes to see me; but my head was still on my pillow. His time was more than up, he must to the ship, so he left me store of messages and flowers and glass-bred grapes, and was off. Time wore away, I got about again, and all was as before, long ere the girls came back, or Miss Dunreddin.
The maids ran hither and yon, and the bells pealed, and the knocker clashed, and the coaches rolled away over the stone pave of the court-yard, and there was embracing and jesting and crying, when suddenly all the pleasant hubbub stood still, for Miss Dunreddin was in the hall, and her page behind her, and she beckoned me from my post aloft on a foot-board, summoning the deserters before me and awarding them future expiations, amidst all manner of jeering and jinking and laughter.
A gentleman from the Provinces to see me in the little parlor: he had brought us letters from home, and after Miss Dunreddin had broken the seals she judged we might have them, and I was at liberty for an hour, and meantime Angus Ingestre awaited me. Angus!
Thus the time drew near my eighteenth summer, and Miss Dunreddin had heard of a ship bound our way from Glasgow, and we were to leave the town with all its rare old histories, and speed through nights and days of seafaring to St. Anne's by the water-side, to the old stone house with its windows overhanging the River of the Cross.
Miss Dunreddin was already off on her pleasuring, he took the gray little governess for duenna, and a blither three never sat out a tragedy, or laughed over wine and oysters in the midst of a garden with its flowers and fountains afterwards. 'T was a long day since the poor little woman had known such merrymaking; and as for me, this playhouse, this mimicry of life, was a new sphere.
I cast about me, and knew that Miss Dunreddin would speed away to take her pleasure, and there'd be none left but the governess and the painting-mistress, with a boarder or two like myself, and as for the twain, I could wind them round my thumb.
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