Oliver!—had been met by some boys who told him the six o’clock bell was not yet rung, and sent him back to perform an office he had done with hours before.  He went to his bell dubiously, something in the dizzy abyss he called his mind that half convinced him he had rung it already.

“Let me pause and consider,” he said once or twice when being urged to the rope, scratching the hair behind his ears with both hands, his gesture of reflection.  “Was there no’ a bairn—an auld-fashioned bairn—helped to ca’ the bell already, and wanted to gie me money for the chance?  It runs in my mind there was a bairn, and that she had us aye boil-boiling away at eggs; but maybe I’m wrong, for I’ll admit I had a dram or two and lost the place.  I don’t believe in dram-dram-dramming, but I aye say if you take a dram, take it in the morning and you get the good of it all day.  It’s a tip I learned in the Crimea.”  But at last they convinced him the bairn was just imagination, and Wanton Wully Oliver spat on his hands and grasped the rope, and so it happened that the morning bell on the New Year’s day on which my story opens was twice rung.

The Dyce handmaid heard it pealing as she hung over the window-sash with her cap agee on her head.  She heard from every quarter—from lanes, closes, tavern rooms, high attics, and back-yards—fifes playing; it was as if she leaned over a magic grove of great big birds, each singing its own song—“Come to the Bower,” or “Monymusk,” or “The Girl I left Behind Me,” noble airs wherein the captain of the band looked for a certain perfection from his musicians before they marched out again at midday.  “For,” said he often in rehearsals, “anything will do in the way of a tune in the dark, my sunny boys, but it must be the tiptop of skill, and no discordancy, when the eyes of the world are on us.  One turn more at ‘Monymusk,’ sunny boys, and then we’ll have a skelp at yon tune of my own composure.”

Besides the sound of the bell and the universal practice of the fifes there were loud vocalists at the Cross, and such laughter in the street that Kate was in an ecstasy.  Once, uplifted beyond all private decorum, she kilted her gown and gave a step of a reel in her kitchen solitude.

“Isn’t it cheery, the noise!” she exclaimed delightly to the letter-carrier who came to the window with the morning’s letters.  “Oh, I am feeling beautiful!  It is—it is—it is just like being inside a pair of bagpipes.”

He was a man who roared, the postman, being used to bawling up long common-stairs in the tenements for the people to come down to the foot themselves for their letters—a man with one roguish eye for the maiden and another at random.  Passing in the letters one by one, he said in tones that on a quieter day might be heard half up the street, “Nothing for you, yourself, personally, Kate, but maybe there’ll be one to-morrow.  Three big blue anes and seven wee anes for the man o’ business himsel’, twa for Miss Dyce (she’s the wonderfu’ correspondent!), and ane for Miss Alison wi’ the smell o’ scented perfume on’t—that’ll be frae the Miss Birds o’ Edinburgh.  And I near forgot—here’s a post-caird for Miss Dyce: hearken to this—

“‘Child arrived Liverpool yesterday; left this morning for Scotland.  Quite safe to go alone, charge of conductor.  Pip, pip!  Molyneux.’”

“Whatna child is it, Kate?”

“‘Pip, pip!’  What in the world’s ‘Pip, pip’?  The child is brother William’s child, to be sure,” said Kate, who always referred to the Dyce relations as if they were her own.  “You have heard of brother William?”

“Him that was married on the play-actress and never wrote home?” shouted the letter-carrier.  “He went away before my time.  Go on; quick, for I’m in a desperate hurry this mornin’.”

“Well, he died abroad in Chickagoo.  God have mercy on him dying so far away from home, and him without a word of Gaelic in his head! and a friend o’ his father ’s bringing the boy home to his aunties.”

“Where in the world’s Chickagoo?” bellowed the postman.

“In America, of course,—where else would it be but in America?” said Kate contemptuously.  “Where is your education not to know that Chickagoo is in America, where the servant-maids have a pound a-week of wages, and learn the piano, and can get married when they like quite easy?”

“Bless me! do you say so?” cried the postman in amazement, and not without a pang of jealousy.

“Yes, I say so!” said Kate in the snappish style she often showed to the letter-carrier.  “And the child is coming this very day with the coach-and-twice from Maryfield railway station—oh them trains! them trains! with their accidents; my heart is in my mouth to think of a child in them.  Will you not come round to the back and get the Mustress’s New Year dram?  She is going to give a New Year dram to every man that calls on business this day.  But I will not let you in, for it is in my mind that you would not be a lucky first-foot.”

“Much obleeged,” said the postman, “but ye needna be feared.  I’m not allowed to go dramming at my duty.  It’s offeecial, and I canna help it.  If it was not offeecial, there’s few letter-carriers that wouldna need to hae iron hoops on their heids to keep their brains from burstin’ on the day efter New Year.”

Kate heard a voice behind her, and pulled her head in hurriedly with a gasp, and a cry of “Mercy, the start I got!” while the postman fled on his rounds.  Miss Dyce stood behind, in the kitchen, indignant.

“You are a perfect heartbreak, Kate,” said the mistress.  “I have rung for breakfast twice, and you never heard me, with your clattering out there to the letter-carrier.  It’s a pity you cannot marry the glee party, as Mr Dyce calls him, and be done with it.”

“Me marry him!” cried the maid indignantly.  “I think I see myself marryin’ a man like yon, and his eyes not neighbours.”

“That’s a trifle in a husband if his heart is good: the letter-carrier’s eyes may—may skew a little, but it’s not to be wondered at, considering the look-out he has to keep on all sides of him to keep out of reach of every trollop in the town who wants to marry him.”

And leaving Kate speechless at this accusation, the mistress of the house took the letters from her hands and went to the breakfast-table with them.

She had read the contents of the post-card before she reached the parlour; its news dismayed her.

“Just imagine!” she cried.  “Here’s that bairn on his way from Liverpool his lee-lone, and not a body with him!”

“What! what!” cried Mr Dyce, whose eyes had been shut to say the grace.  “Isn’t that actor-fellow, Molyneux, coming with him, as he promised?”

Miss Dyce sunk in a chair and burst into tears, crushing the post-card in her hand.

“What does he say?” demanded her brother.

“He says—he says—oh, dear me!—he says ‘Pip, pip!’” quoth the weeping sister.

CHAPTER III.

“I misdoubted Mr Molyneux from the very first,” said Ailie, turning as white as a clout.  “From all his post-cards he was plainly too casual.  Stop it, Bell, my dear—have sense; the child’s in a Christian land, and in care of somebody who is probably more dependable than this delightful Molyneux.”

Mr Dyce took out an old, thick, silver verge.  “Nine o’clock,” he said, with a glance at its