green knives, while the people round were still handing their visitors a cup in their hand, and cake and scones on a cake-stand! I was a queen and no widow.... Why, Marget, is it nine o'clock already?" Marget gave her demure, respectful curtsey, which was so oddly at variance with her frank and fearless comments on things in general, and sat down on a chair beside Mysie. "Ay, Mem, it's nine o'clock. It's juist chappit on the lobby clock." She directed a suspicious glance towards the table where Ann sat. "Is Miss Ann gettin' on wi' yer _Life_? Dinna let her put in ony lees aboot us. How faur has she gotten? Juist to yer marriage? Oh, that's a' richt. I wasna there then. But I can keep ye richt aboot what happened ony time in the last five-and-thirty years." CHAPTER IV "No honeymoon!" Ann's pen was held aloft in amaze, as she looked across at her mother seated at the other side of the fire in her very own chair that had stood by the nursery fireside in long past days. Well did Ann remember the comfortable squat legs of it from the time when she had lived in that world of chair-legs and the underside of sofas which we all inhabit at the beginning of things. Ann's mother was knitting as usual, a stocking for a long-legged grandson; but she knitted mechanically, not looking at her work, her eyes on the dancing flames, a little reminiscent smile turning up the corners of her mouth. "No honeymoon!" Ann again ejaculated. "What was Father thinking of? Didn't you mind?" "Mind? No. Where would we go in December but to our own little house? You must remember that I had hardly ever left Etterick except to go to school, and the journey north seemed a wonderful adventure to me; and your father was in such a hurry to show me the little Manse and all the new furniture that the train journey seemed all too long. We got to Inchkeld very late, and it was snowing hard. We looked about for the cab that had been ordered to meet us, but your father said, 'There's only a carriage and pair; that can't be for us--let's walk.' So off we set, I in my sealskin coat and prune-coloured bonnet! And the sad thing was that the carriage and pair was meant for us. It turned out that the carriage-hirer came from Priorsford, and when he got the order he said, 'It's for Mr. Mark and his bride; I'll send a pair.' And the pair came, and we walked!" Ann laughed. "Too much humility doesn't pay. There's a parable there if I had time to think it out. Well, and did the house come up to your expectations?"