“Ay, you can say that,” Nanny entreated with such eagerness that Babbie remarked a little bitterly: 

“There is no fear of Nanny’s telling any one that the friend is a gypsy girl.”

“Na, na,” agreed Nanny, again losing Babbie’s sarcasm.  “I winna let on.  It’s so queer to be befriended by an Egyptian.”

“It is scarcely respectable,” Babbie said.

“It’s no,” answered simple Nanny.

I suppose Nanny’s unintentional cruelty did hurt Babbie as much as Gavin thought.  She winced, and her face had two expressions, the one cynical, the other pained.  Her mouth curled as if to tell the minister that gratitude was nothing to her, but her eyes had to struggle to keep back a tear.  Gavin was touched, and she saw it, and for a moment they were two people who understood each other.

“I, at least,” Gavin said in a low voice, “will know who is the benefactress, and think none the worse of her because she is a gypsy.”

At this Babbie smiled gratefully to him, and then both laughed, for they had heard Nanny remarking to the kettle, “But I wouldna hae been nane angry if she had telled Enoch that the minister was to take his tea here.  Susy’ll no believe’t though I tell her, as tell her I will.”

To Nanny the table now presented a rich appearance, for besides the teapot there were butter and loaf-bread and cheesies:  a biscuit of which only Thrums knows the secret.

“Draw in your chair, Mr. Dishart,” she said, in suppressed excitement.

“Yes,” said Babbie, “you take this chair, Mr. Dishart, and Nanny will have that one, and I can sit humbly on the stool.”

But Nanny held up her hands in horror.

“Keep us a’!” she exclaimed; “the lassie thinks her and me is to sit down wi’ the minister!  We’re no to gang that length, Babbie; we’re just to stand and serve him, and syne we’ll sit down when he has risen.”

“Delightful!” said Babbie, clapping her hands.  “Nanny, you kneel on that side of him, and I will kneel on this.  You will hold the butter and I the biscuits.”

But Gavin, as this girl was always forgetting, was a lord of creation.

“Sit down both of you at once!” he thundered, “I command you.”

Then the two women fell into their seats; Nanny in terror, Babbie affecting it.

CHAPTER XV.

The minister bewitched—­second sermon against women.

To Nanny it was a dizzying experience to sit at the head of her own table, and, with assumed calmness, invite the minister not to spare the loaf-bread.  Babbie’s prattle, and even Gavin’s answers, were but an indistinct noise to her, to be as little regarded, in the excitement of watching whether Mr. Dishart noticed that there was a knife for the butter, as the music of the river by a man who is catching trout.  Every time Gavin’s cup went to his lips Nanny calculated (correctly) how much he had drunk, and yet, when the right moment arrived, she asked in the English voice that is fashionable at ceremonies, “if his cup was toom.”