So, in spite of John Bairdieson’s utmost endeavours, and waiting only to put his clothes together, Ralph took his way over to the Sciennes, where his uncle, the professor, lived in a new house with his three daughters, Jemima, Kezia, and Keren-happuch.  The professor had always been very kind to Ralph.  He was not a Marrow man, and therefore, according to the faith of his father, an outcast from the commonwealth.  But he was a man of the world of affairs, keen for the welfare of his class at the University College—­a man crabbed and gnarled on the surface, but within him a strong vein of tenderness of the sort that always seems ashamed of catching its possessor in a kind action.

To him Ralph knew that he could tell the whole story.  The Sciennes was on the very edge of the green fields.  The corn-fields stretched away from the dyke of the Professor’s garden to the south towards the red-roofed village of Echo Bank and the long ridge of Liberton, crowned by the square tower on which a stone dining-room table had been turned up, its four futile legs waving in the air like a beetle overset on its back.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

Jemima, Kezia, and little Keren-happuch.

Ralph found the professor out.  He was, indeed, engaged in an acrimonious discussion on the Wernerian theory, and at that moment he was developing a remarkable scientific passion, which threatened to sweep his adversaries from the face of the earth in the debris of their heresies.

Within doors, however, Ralph found a very warm welcome from his three cousins—­Jemima, Kezia, and Keren-happuch.  Jemima was tall and angular, with her hair accurately parted in the middle, and drawn in a great sweep over her ears—­a fashion intended by Nature for Keren-happuch, who was round of face, and with a complexion in which there appeared that mealy pink upon the cheeks which is peculiar to the metropolis.  Kezia was counted the beauty of the family, and was much looked up to by her elder and younger sisters.

These three girls had always made much of Ralph, ever since he used to play about the many garrets and rooms of their old mansion beneath the castle, before they moved out to the new house at the Sciennes.  They had long been in love with him, each in her own way; though they had always left the first place to Kezia, and wove romances in their own heads with Ralph for the central figure.  Jemima, especially, had been very jealous of her sisters, who were considerably younger, and had often spoken seriously to them about flirting with Ralph.  It was Jemima who came to the door; for, in those days, all except the very grandest persons thought no more of opening the outer than the inner doors of their houses.

“Ralph Peden, have you actually remembered that there is such a house as the Sciennes?” said Jemima, holding up her face to receive the cousinly kiss.