me.
But then, to be sure, we had been neighbours all our lives, for her
father, Andrew Dunlop, kept a grocer's shop not fifty yards from our
house, and she and I had been playmates ever since our school-days, and
had fallen to sober and serious love as soon as we arrived at what we at
any rate called years of discretion--which means that I was nineteen, and
she seventeen, when we first spoke definitely about getting married. And
two years had gone by since then, and one reason why I had no objection
to earning Mr. Gilverthwaite's ten pounds was that Maisie and I meant to
wed as soon as my salary was lifted to three pounds a week, as it soon
was to be, and we were saving money for our furnishing--and ten pounds,
of course, would be a nice help.
So presently I went along the street to Dunlop's and called Maisie out,
and we went down to the walls by the river mouth, which was a regular
evening performance of ours. And in a quiet corner, where there was a
seat on which we often sat whispering together of our future, I told
her that I had to do a piece of business for our lodger that night and
that the precise nature of it was a secret which I must not let out
even to her.
"But here's this much in it, Maisie," I went on, taking care that there
was no one near us that could catch a word of what I was saying; "I can
tell you where the spot is that I'm to do the business at, for a fine
lonely spot it is to be in at the time of night I'm to be there--an hour
before midnight, and the place is that old ruin that's close by where
Till meets Tweed--you know it well enough yourself."
I felt her shiver a bit at that, and I knew what it was that was in her
mind, for Maisie was a girl of imagination, and the mention of a lonely
place like that, to be visited at such an hour, set it working.
"Yon's a queer man, that lodger of your mother's, Hughie," she said. "And
it's a strange time and place you're talking of. I hope nothing'll come
to you in the way of mischance."
"Oh, it's nothing, nothing at all!" I hastened to say. "If you knew it
all, you'd see it's a very ordinary business that this man can't do
himself, being kept to his bed. But all the same, there's naught like
taking precautions beforehand, and so I'll tell you what we'll do. I
should be back in town soon after twelve, and I'll give a tap at your
window as I pass it, and then you'll know all's right."
That would be an easy enough thing to manage, for Maisie's roo
|