Catherine was as well acquainted with every bird’s nest within her bounds as were the Friarton boys, whom she could not keep out of the shrubbery in the bird-nesting season, and whom she detested with an illogical detestation—to say the least, enough to show that she had never had a brother. She would suddenly start out on these boys from a little wilderness of green branches, and assail them with a torrent of passionate reproach. The boys would stare blankly at the apparition they had aroused, but any unwonted bashfulness, if excited at all, would speedily give way to a sense of the utter disproportion between cause and effect. The result would be an ironical titter or guffaw (for the Friarton boys were by no means models of good manners), and a noisy, careless retreat to be followed by a return rendered doubly certain by Catherine’s injudicious challenge. Catherine retreated too, covered with swift mortification for her extravagant anger. But it was difficult to be patient with those young savages, who could no more be barred out than the waves of the sea could be held back, who would make short work in one holiday afternoon of all those exquisite little homes of moss and leaves, leaving the poor, fond, helpless architects fluttering in despair round their ruined dwellings and pillaged treasures of blue, green, black and red spotted, and freckled eggs, or, more precious still, downy, yellow-beaked, tottering, gaping fledglings. The nests were perfectly beautiful and sacred to Catherine, and she took great pleasure in visiting them all round every morning, with elaborate precautions not to disturb family arrangements or trouble heads of houses in the performance of their duties. Catherine was almost as happy and much less liable to worry, among her lilies, of which she cultivated an infinite variety; her trailing love-lies-bleeding, like a warrior’s plumes heavy and drooping with the red stains of battle; the golden shields, with the dark discs and the stiff grenadier stalks, of her sunflowers; the pinked perfection and spicy breath of her clove carnations. She would hang over each of them, and touch them with a lingering, fondling touch, as if they were sentient creatures, and could welcome and respond to a friendly caress. She hated to shorten their brief blossoming time; she would never gather them with lavish wastefulness. She liked to have them near her at all times, and so would take a tribute from their abundance to ‘busk’ her person and the Meadows drawing-room, but she never did it unsparingly and recklessly.