able.
The little lady was herself flushed with a sharp walk, and muffled up
to the throat from a cutting wind.

"Why, Rotha, my girl, what ever may be the matter with you?" said
Liza, coming to a pause in the middle of the floor, and, without
removing the hands that had been stuffed up her sleeves from the cold,
looking fixedly in her face.

"I don't know, Liza; I wish you could tell me, lass," said Rotha,
recovering enough self-possession to simulate a subterfuge.

"Here I've been churning and churning since morning, and don't seem
much nigher the butter yet."

"It's more than the butter that pests you," said Liza, with a wise
shake of the head.

"Yes; it must be the churn. I can make nothing of it."

"Shaf on the churn, girl! You just look like Bessie MacNab when they
said Jamie o' the Glen had coddled her at the durdum yon night at
Robin Forbes's."

"Hush, Liza," said Rotha, stooping unnecessarily low to investigate
the progress of her labors, and then adding, from the depths of the
churn, "why, and how did Bessie look?"

"Look? look?" cried Liza, with a tip of the chin upwards, as though
the word itself ought to have been sufficiently explicit,--"look, you
say? Why," continued Liza, condescending at length to be more definite
as to the aforesaid young lady's appearance after a kiss at a country
dance, "why, she looked just for the world like you, Rotha."

Then throwing off her thick outer garment without waiting for any kind
of formal invitation, Liza proceeded to make herself at home in a very
practical way.

"Come, let me have a turn at the churn," she said, "and let us see if
it is the churn that ails you--giving you two great eyes staring wide
as if you were sickening for a fever, and two cheeks as red as the
jowls of 'Becca Rudd's turkey."

In another moment Liza was rolling up the sleeves of her gown,
preparatory to the experimental exercise she had proposed to herself;
but this was not a task that had the disadvantage of interrupting the
flow of her gossip.

"But I say, lass," she rattled on, "have you heard what that great
gammerstang of a Mother Garth has been telling 'Becca Rudd about
_you_? 'Becca told me herself, and I says to 'Becca, says I, 'Don't
you believe it; it's all a lie, for that old wizzent ninny bangs them
all at lying; and that's saying a deal, you know. Besides,' I says,
'what does it matter to her or to you, 'Becca, or to me, if so be that
it _is_ true, which I'm not for b