“Kate,” said Miss Mackenzie, “dress her in the lassie Grant’s clothes:  they are the most likely to fit her.  Don’t lose time:  I want to see her again before I go.”

Kate fished up her charge, all smoking, from the soapsuds and rubbed her down before the fire.  Then the tangled wet hair was parted evenly and smoothed into dark locks on either side of her face.  Raiment clean, but the coarsest of the coarse, was found for her.  A brown wincey dress surmounted all.  Shoes and stockings came last of all, probably in the order of importance assigned to them by Kate.

From the arm-chair of the matron’s sitting-room Miss Mackenzie surveyed her charge with satisfaction.  Baubie looked subdued, contented, perhaps grateful, and was decidedly uncomfortable.  Every vestige of the picturesque was gone, obliterated clean by soap and water, and Kate’s hair-comb, a broken-toothed weapon that had come off second best in its periodic conflicts with her own barley-mow, had disposed for ever of the wild, curly tangle of hair.  Her eyes had red rims to them, caused by superfluous soap and water, and in its present barked condition, when all the dirt was gone, Baubie’s face had rather an interesting, wistful expression.  She seemed not to stand very steadily in her boots, which were much too big for her.

Miss Mackenzie surveyed her with great satisfaction.  The brown wincey and the coarse apron seemed to her the neophyte’s robe, betokening Baubie’s conversion from arab nomadism to respectability and from a vagabond trade to decorous industry.

“Now, Baubie, you can knit:  I mean to give you needles and worsted to knit yourself stockings.  Won’t that be nice?  I am sure you never knitted stockings for yourself before.”

“Yes, mem,” replied Baubie, shuffling her feet.

“Now, what bed is she to get, Mrs. Duncan?  Let us go up stairs and see the dormitory.”

“I thought I would put her in the room with Kate:  I changed the small bed in there.  If you will just step up stairs, Miss Mackenzie?”

The party reached the dormitory by a narrow wooden staircase, the whiteness of which testified to the scrubbing powers of Kate’s red arms and those of her compeers.  All the windows were open, and the east wind came in at its will, nippingly cold if airy.  They passed through a large, low-ceilinged room into a smaller one, in which were only four beds:  a small iron stretcher beside the window was pointed out as Baubie’s.  Miss Mackenzie turned down the red-knitted coverlet and looked at the blankets.  They were perfectly clean, like everything else, and, like everything else too, very coarse and very well worn.

“This will do very nicely.—­Baubie, this is to be your bed.”

Baubie, fresh from the lock-up and Kennedy’s Lodgings, might have been expected to show some trace of her sense of comparison, but not a vestige of expression crossed her face:  she looked up in civil acknowledgment of having heard:  that was all.