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I always think Miss Bathgate's such an insolent woman; no notion of her proper place. She looks at me as if she actually thought she was my equal, and wasn't she positively rude to you, Muriel, when you called with some message?" "Oh, frightful woman!" said Muriel airily. "She was most awfully rude to me. You would have thought that I wanted to burgle something." She gave an affected laugh.
And this is no' yin o' the skimpy kind; it's fine and fussy and soft ... Here, did the Lord send Miss Jean a present?... I doot he's aff for guid. Weel, weel, guid-nicht." With a heightened colour Jean said good-night to her guests, separated Mhor from his train, and sent him with Jock to bed. As she went upstairs, Bella Bathgate's words rang in her ears dismally: "I doot he's aff for guid."
"It is an extraordinary thing, but almost the very minute you left Priorsford things began to happen. "I told you in the note I wrote the day you left that Bella Bathgate's lodger had arrived and that I had seen her, but I didn't realise then what a difference her coming would make to us.
M'Cosh had been eight years with the Jardines and was in many ways such a treasure, and always such an amusement, that they would not have parted from her for much red gold. "Bella Bathgate's expectin' her lodger the morn." The tea-tray was ready to be carried away, but Mrs. M'Cosh lingered. "Oh, is she?" said Jean. "Who is it that's coming?"
There were the neatest of tea-knives, the daintiest of spoons, jam glowed crimson through crystal, butter was there in a lordly dish, cakes from London, delicate sandwiches, Miss Bathgate's best and lightest in the way of scones, shortbread crisp from the oven of Mrs. M'Cosh.
Bathgate's wedding-gown of puce-coloured cashmere to her youngest son's first pair of "breeks," the whole smelling strongly of naphtha from the kist where it had lain regretful thoughts of other beds came to her.
One of the guests, a little music-teacher, said: "The worst of Christmas is that it brings back to one's mind all the other Christmasses and the people who were with us then...." Bella Bathgate's voice was heard talking to Mrs. M'Cosh at the door: "I dinna believe in keeping Christmas; it's a popish festival. New Year's the time. Ye can eat yer currant-bun wi' a relish then.
A man offered himself a man with a great position and I accepted him and it was worse than ever, so I fled from it all to Priorsford. I loved it from the first, the little town and the river and the hills, and Bella Bathgate's grim honesty and poor cookery! And you came into my life again and I found I couldn't marry the other man and his position...."
You either know them, or you don't. A sort of instinct for dress, I suppose." Jean was sitting in Pamela's bedroom. Pamela's bedroom it was now, certainly not Bella Bathgate's. The swinging looking-glass had been replaced by one which, according to Pamela, was at least truthful. "The other one," she complained, "made me look pale green and drowned."
It was that barren hour in the afternoon when luncheon is over and forgotten, and tea is yet far distant, and most of the passengers were either asleep or listlessly trying to read light literature. Alone in a first-class carriage sat Bella Bathgate's lodger Miss Pamela Reston.
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