As for Milly, running on before, her aunt was to her as the exacting, but, on the whole, benevolent fairy who appears in all the tales, who scolded Cinderella, yet gave her the pumpkin coach, and who had drawers upon drawers full of shreds and patches, strings of beads, bright bits of silk, everything that was necessary for the dressing of dolls and making of needlebooks. The pat-pat of the cane seemed part of the old lady to Milly’s ear, and she was by no means sure that the cane was not a third leg upon which Aunt Jean moved as ordinary mortals did on the more usual complement. No one except Miss Jean said a word as they sat down to table, and Betty, with a speed and noiselessness, which were born at once of terror and of long practice, served the broth. Milly said they were very good, and asked for a little more of them, without any perception that she was ungrammatical, and as they were hot and savoury Miss Jean mollified by degrees. “There’s one good thing,” she said, “that you cannot spoil broth by waiting. That and porridge should always be well boiled. I hope your grand cook knows that among her other accomplishments. But, maybe Milly is above porridge, though her father was brought up upon them, and his father before him, and all the best Scots gentry from the days of Robert Bruce.” “I have a few porridge in a saucer every morning,” said Milly, proudly, “and May gives me the rest of the cream after papa’s last cup of tea.” “A few in a saucer!” Miss Jean retorted, with renewed vehemence. (N.B. The Scotch reader does not need to be informed that porridge is plural as well as broth.) “I hope, Marjory Hay-Heriot, that you may never have to give a severe account of the way you’ve brought up that motherless bairn.” “Cream is not immoral, I hope, aunty?” said Marjory, with rising spirit. “Immoral! Luxury’s immoral, indulgence is immoral, and they’re immoral that say a word to the contrary,” cried the old lady. “Will you tell me that to bring up a fellow-creature to self-indulgence is no a sinful act? But I never understood the ways of this generation, nor do I want to understand them. You’re all alike--all alike! from Tom’s horse-racing to Milly’s saucer of parritch--it is the same thing over again. What you please! and not what’s your duty, and the best thing for you in this world and the next. Betty, the boiled beef is too plain for these young ladies. Bring it to me, and put the chicken before Miss Marjory. A queen may eat a bit of chicken, but the boiled beef’s aye good enough for me.” The fact was that the chicken had been added to the meal, expressly for the benefit of Marjory and Milly. “Bairns are brought up different to what they were in my time,” Miss Jean had said to her cook, benevolently, an hour before. “That chucky’s young and tender, and they’ll like it better than the beef.”