“You spared him!” said my mother.  And in a minute she added, softwise, “Ay, were that all!”

“Ah,” said Mary, “but I’ll take the next one that asks me, if it’s only to save myself the taunts at home!  You thought you were winning to a soft nest, children, where there were nought but larks and thrushes and maybe nightingales,—­and we’re all cuckoos.

  “’Cuckoo! cuckoo! sweet voice of Spring,
    Without you sad the year had been,
  The vocal heavens your welcome ring,
    The hedge-rows ope and take you in,
      Cuckoo! cuckoo!

  “’Cuckoo! cuckoo!  O viewless sprite,
    Your song enchants the sighing South,
  It wooes the wild-flower to the light,
    And curls the smile round my love’s mouth,
      Cuckoo! cuckoo!’”

“Have done your claver, Mary!” cried Margray.  “One cannot hear herself think, for the din of your twittering!—­I’ll cut the sleeve over crosswise, I think,”—­and, heedless, she herself commenced humming, in an undertone, ’"Cuckoo! cuckoo!’—­There! you’ve driven mother out!”

Mary laughed.

“When I’m married, Ailie,” she whispered, “I’ll sing from morn till night, and you shall sit and hear me, without Margray’s glowering at us, or my mother so much as saying, ‘Why do you so?’”

For all the time the song had been purling from her smiling lips, Mrs. Strathsay’s eyes were laid, a weight like lead, on me, and then she had risen as if it hurt her, and walked to the door.

“Or when you’ve a house of your own,” added Mary, “we will sing together there.”

“Oh, Mary!” said I, like the child I was, forgetting the rest, “when I’m married, you will come and live with me?”

“You!” said my mother, stepping through the door and throwing the words over her shoulder as she went, not exactly for my ears, but as if the bubbling in her heart must have some vent.  “And who is it would take such a fright?”

“My mother’s fair daft,” said Margray, looking after her with a perplexed gaze, and dropping her scissors.  “Surely, Mary, you shouldn’t tease her as you do.  She’s worn more in these four weeks than in as many years.  You’re a fickle changeling!”

But Mary rose and sped after my mother, with her tripping foot; and in a minute she came back laughing and breathless.

“You put my heart in my mouth, Mistress Graeme,” she said.  “And all for nothing.  My mother’s just ordering the cream to be whipped.  Well, little one, what now?”

“It’s just this dress of Margray’s,—­mother’s right,—­’t will never do for me; I’ll wear shadows.  But ’t will not need the altering of a hair for you, Mary, and you shall take it.”

“I think I see myself,” said Mary Strathsay, “wearing the dress Margray married Graeme in!” For Margray had gone out to my mother in her turn.

“Then it’s yours, Effie.  I’ll none of it!”

“I’m finely fitted out, then, with the robe here and the veil there! bridal or burial, toss up a copper and which shall it be?” said Effie, looking upward, and playing with her spools like a juggler’s oranges.  And here Margray came back.