She finished it off deliberately, and turned her bright eyes and flushed face toward the speaker.

“Who gave you leave, Baubie Wishart,” went on the angry matron, “to make yon noise?  You ought to think shame of such conduct, singing your good-for-nothing street-songs like a tinkler.  One would think ye would feel glad never to hear of such things again.  Let me have no more of this, do ye hear?  I just wonder what Miss Mackenzie would say to ye!—­Kate, stop here till they are all bedded and turn off yon gas.”

Long before the gas was extinguished Baubie had retired into darkness beneath the bed-clothes, rage and mortification swelling her small heart.  Good-for-nothing street-songs!  Tinkler!  Mrs. Duncan’s scornful epithets rang in her ears and cut her to the quick.  She lay awake, trembling with anger and indignation, until long after Kate had followed the younger fry to rest, and their regular breathing, which her ears listened for till they caught it from every bed, warned her that the weary occupants were safely asleep:  then she sat up in bed.  The moonlight was streaming into the room through the uncurtained window, and lit up her tumbled head and hot face.  After a cautious pause she stepped out on the floor and went round the foot of her bed to the window.  She knelt down on the floor, as if she were in search of something, and began feeling with her hand on the lower part of the shutter.  Then, close to the floor, and in a place where they were likely to escape detection, she marked clearly and distinctly eight deep, short scratches in an even line on the yellow-painted woodwork.  She ran her fingers over them until she could feel each scratch distinctly.  Eight!  She counted them thrice to make sure, then jumped back into bed, and in a few minutes was as fast asleep as her neighbors.

The days wore into weeks, and the weeks had soon made a month, and time, as it went, left Baubie more demure, quieter and more diligent—­diligent apparently at least, for the knitting, though it advanced, showed no sign of corresponding improvement, and the rest of her work was simply scamped.  March had given way to April, and the late Edinburgh spring at last began to give signs of its approach.  The chestnuts showed brown glistening tips to their branch-ends, and their black trunks became covered with an emerald-colored mildew; the rod-like branches of the poplars turned a pale whitish-green and began to knot and swell; the Water of Leith overflowed, and ran bubbling and mud-colored under the bridge; and the grass by its banks, and even that in the front green of the refuge, showed here and there a red-eyed daisy.  The days grew longer and longer, and of a mild evening the thrush’s note was to be heard above the brawling of the stream from the thickets of Dean Terrace Gardens.

Baubie Wishart waited passively.  Every day saw her more docile and demure, and every day saw a new scratch added to her tally on the window-shutter behind her bed.