Part 28 (1/2)

”Why, they would probably have been arrested and taken to the next town as suspicious characters,” pursued Feargus.

The excuse seemed rather far-fetched, Billie thought, but then Feargus had a great sympathy for poor people and perhaps it would not have done any good to send the detective down into the little quiet dell to destroy the peace of the wanderers, as Feargus had called them.

What would she have said, if she had known that their young Irish courier left the hotel that night at bedtime on a horse hired in the village and did not return until near dawn?

CHAPTER XVIII.-”AULD LANG SYNE.”

Two women, one well past middle age and the other just turned seventeen, walked along Princes Street in Edinburgh one morning, taking in deep breaths of the warm heather-scented breeze from the inland hills.

Perhaps they were exiles, restored to their native land after long wanderings in distant countries. Who could tell? At least a pa.s.ser-by might have thought as much from the expressions of intense pleasure that animated their two faces. And, as if it were not enough to be treading the soil trod by one's ancestors, there came to them the sound of a bagpipe (bagpipes are not so plentiful in Edinburgh as of yore), actually playing their own stirring ancestral chant:

”The Campbells are coming, Oh, ho! Oh, ho!”

”Well of all the strange coincidences, my dear Wilhelmina,” exclaimed the elder of the two women, none other than Miss Helen Eustace Campbell.

”Isn't it, cousin?” cried Billie, her soul fired with the martial strains of her ancestors.

But stranger than the coincidence of the bagpipe was the condition of the weather. It was a bright and beautiful day!

”When I was here more than thirty years ago it rained perpetually,”

remarked Miss Campbell. ”As much as I loved Edinburgh and valued its a.s.sociations with former generations of my family, I will admit to you privately, my dear, that I was glad to leave.”

There was a subdued excitement in Miss Campbell's voice, but Billie did not notice it. She smiled dreamily.

”I think I could love it even in rainy weather,” she said. ”It is the most picturesque and beautiful city I was ever in.”

She raised her eyes with wors.h.i.+pful reverence to Edinburgh Castle, old and gray, perched on the summit of a bold rock in the distance, like an ancient sentinel always on duty.

The two wanderers, who had by some accident of fate been born in a foreign land when they might just as well have been born in Scotland where they really belonged, walked on the air of expectancy.

Behind them followed those three alien persons of Irish and English descent who regarded the sights like any common tourists and experienced only tourists' palpitations.

Miss Campbell pulled out her watch nervously.

”Did our Cousin Annie say that half past one was the lunch hour?” she asked.

”Yes,” answered Billie. ”The note said, 'It would felicitate me if you, my dear Cousin Helen, and my younger cousin, Wilhelmina, and your three American friends, will lunch with me this afternoon at half past one.'”

”A very unusual woman, my dear,” said Miss Campbell. ”Thirty years ago she was the very pink of propriety--”

”Meaning as stiff as a ramrod?” asked Billie.

”Well, yes, a little stiff, to the free and easy American type. We must mind our manners this afternoon and be very careful what we do and say.”

”In the meantime, we'll enjoy life,” cried Billie. ”We'll look at the Old Town and the Castle and when the time comes for lunch, we'll bottle up our spirits and pretend we are just Scotch spinsters and members of the Presbyterian Church. And, by the way, Cousin Helen, are you going to mention that in the last hundred years we've turned Episcopal?”

”We sha'n't thrust it on her, child,” replied the little lady. ”If she brings up the subject, of course we will have to tell her the truth.”