Читать книгу The Primrose Path: A Chapter in the Annals of the Kingdom of Fife онлайн

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“Leddy!” said Mrs. Glen, surprised; and instinctively she searched around her to find out who this could be. “You’ll be meaning Mary Fleming, the dress-maker lass; some call her Miss; or maybe the bit governess at Sir Claud’s.”

Rob laughed; in the midst of his troubles this one gleam of triumph was sweet. “I mean no stranger,” he said, “but an old friend—one that was once my companion and playfellow; and now she’s grown up into the prettiest fairy, and does not despise me even now.”

Mrs. Glen was completely nonplussed. She looked at him with an air of imperious demand, which, gradually yielding to the force of her curiosity, fell, as he made no reply, into a quite softened interrogation. “An auld companion?” she said to herself, bewildered; then added, in a gentler tone than she had used since his return, a side remark to herself: “He’s no that auld himsel’.”

“No,” he said, “but she is younger, mother, and as beautiful as an angel, I think; and she had not forgotten Rob Glen.”

His mother looked at him more and more perplexed. But with her curiosity and with her perplexity her heart melted. Lives there a mother so hard, even when her anger is hottest, as to be indifferent to any one who cares for her boy? “I canna think who you’re meaning,” she said; “auld companions are scarce even to the like o’ me— I mind upon nobody that you could name by that name, a callant like you. Auld playfellow! there’s the minister’s son, as great a credit to his family as you’re a trial; but he’s no a leddy—”