“My bonnie clean things!” cried Miss Bethune, “with the scent of the grass upon them--and now they’re all spoiled with the dust of Bloomsbury! Gather them up and carry them away, and then you can come back here.” She remained for a moment as quiet as before, after Gilchrist had hurried away; but any touch would have been sufficient to move her in her agitation, and presently she rose and began to pace about the room. “Gone to my room to greet there, is that what she thinks? Like Mary going to the grave to weep there. No, no, that’s not the truth. It’s the other way. I might be going to laugh, and to clap my hands, as they say in the Psalms. But laughing is not the first expression of joy. I would maybe be more like greeting, as she says. A person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing, nothing but the old way of tears, which is just a contradiction. And maybe, after all, she was right. I’ll go to my room and weep for thankfulness, and lightheartedness, and joy.” “Oh, mem,” cried Gilchrist, coming in, “gang softly, gang softly! You’re more sure than any mortal person has a right to be.” “Ye old unbeliever,” cried Miss Bethune, pausing in the midst of her sob. “What has mortality to do with evidence? It would be just as true if I were to die to-morrow, for that matter.” “Eh, mem,” cried Gilchrist again, “ye’re awfu’ easy to please in the way of evidence. What do you call evidence? A likeness ye think ye see, but I canna; and there’s naething in a likeness. Miss Dora is no more like her papaw than me, there is nothing to be lippened to in the like of that. And then the age--that would maybe be about the same, I grant ye that, so much as it comes to; and a name that is no’ the right name, but a kind of an approach to it.” “You are a bonnie person,” cried Miss Bethune, “to take authority upon you about names, and never to think of the commonest old Scotch custom, that the son drops or turns the other way the name the father has taken to his own. I hope I know better! If nothing had ever happened, if the lad had been bred and trained at home, he would be Gordon, just as sure as he is Gordon now.” “I’m no’ a person of quality, mem,” said Gilchrist, holding her ground. “I have never set up for being wan of the gentry: it would ill become me, being just John Gilchrist the smith’s daughter, and your servant-woman, that has served you this five and twenty years. But there are as many Gordons in Aberdeen as there are kirk steeples in this weary London town.” Miss Bethune made an impatient gesture. “You’re a sagacious person, Gilchrist, altogether, and might be a ruling elder if you were but a man: but I think perhaps I know what’s in it as well as you do, and if I’m satisfied that a thing is, I will not yield my faith, as you might know by this time, neither to the Lord President himself, nor even to you.”