"Ey, ye're just gabbin', lassie," Jean kicked off her night-slippers, thrust her feet into bed, lay back, drew the coverlet up over a chest broad and flat as a man's, and, with a hand thrust under the back of her head, regarded Daisy from the pillow. "Ye'r no sic a trollop as ye'd mak' yersel' oot to be. If I catch ye in any capers--any mischief, I mean, for I ken there's nae bad in ye--I'll skelp ye as I would a bairn. Mind that. Get y'r duddies off, now, an' get to bed, for to-morrow's house-cleanin' day." CHAPTER IX. A DANCE AND AN INVITATION. "Well, ye see," Jean remarked, next evening, as the two girls, in the delicious after-supper leisure of house-cleaning day, sat together in the kitchen, "he didna even keek in on us, all day; an' he's said naething to the Mistress, for she's the same as ever an' couldn't keep it in if she was worried." Daisy, her virile young self merely exhilarated, as it is with the healthy young, after the long day of muscular labor, was barren of speech but fruitful of glances out through the window, where the sunlight of the long evening laid an elbow of shadow at the root of each of the prim trees bordering Harrison's cement drive, and shone red upon the open doorway of the garage. Harrison was spending the evening out somewhere, and the big car was gone; but the electric brougham in which Lady Harrison--who merely "put on style" by her husband's request, and would really much rather have walked, or taken the trolley-car, on her trips downtown--paid her social calls or went shopping, stood invitingly in its place. "Can the Missis run that thing?" said Daisy. "Ey," said Jean, who had been regarding the younger girl's curves and color a little wistfully, but none the less good-heartedly, "Ou, ay. She disna like it, though. She's a plain woman--a richt leddy, though she was na born to it, no more than him, ye ken." "I wish she'd give that pretty car to me," said Daisy. "Ay," Jean smiled reflectively, "nae doubt, nae doubt. If wishes were electric buggies, there's nane of us would tramp. She'd be daft enough to give it to ye, too, I doubt, if it wasna for her man. Ey, ey--whiles I wish I had him, just for a wee. I'd train him the way a mon should walk, so I would. Still, there's got tae be a master, ye ken, in every family. I wouldna like a man that was saft, all around. I'd want him tae be canny in business, like Sir Thomas, ye see--but I'd want tae be mistress at home.... But, by the bye, lassie, speakin' o' men n' cattle o' yon kind," Jean smiled to herself as she said this, and wished some man, for the good of his conceit, had happened along unexpectedly and heard this comparison, slipping out, as it had, by happy inspiration, "how wad ye like the evenin' out? The Mistress hersel' said that, as ye were a young thing and would likely be wantin' a good time, to give ye an evenin' to yerself whenever I could spare ye."