"Na, Jess, lass, I'll no tell a soul--no yin."
"No' even Meg-mind!" repeated Jess, who felt that this was a vital point.
So Saunders promised, though he had intended to do so on the first opportunity.
"Mind, if ye do, I'll never gie ye a hand wi' Meg again as lang as I leeve!" said Jess emphatically.
"Jess, d'ye think she likes me?" asked the widower in a hushed whisper.
"Saunders, I'm jnist sure o't," replied Jess with great readiness. "But she's no yin o' the kind to let on."
"Na," groaned Saunders, "I wuss to peace she was. But ye mind me that I gat a letter frae the young minister that I was to gie to Meg. But as you're the yin he comes to see, I maun as weel gie't direct to yoursel'."
"It wad be as weel," said Jess, with a strange sort of sea-fire like moonshine in her eyes.
Saunders passed over a paper to her readily, and Jess, with her hand still on his coat-collar, in a way that Meg had never used, thanked him in her own way.
"Juist bide a wee," she said; "I'll be wi' ye in a minute!"
Jess hurried down into the old square-plotted garden, which ran up to the orchard trees. She soon found a moss-rose bush from which she selected a bud, round which the soft feathery envelope was just beginning to curl back. Then she went round by the edge of the brook which keeps damp one side of the orchard, where she found some single stems of forget-me-nots, shining in the dusk like beaded turquoise. She pulled some from the bottom of the half-dry ditch, and setting the pale moss-rosebud in the middle, she bound the whole together with a striped yellow and green withe. Then snipping the stacks with her pocket scissors, she brought the posy to Saunders, with instructions to wrap it in a dock-leaf and never to let his hands touch it the whole way.
Saunders, dazed and fascinated, forgetful even of Meg and loyalty, promised. The glamour of Jess, the gypsy, was upon him.
"But what am I to say," he asked.
"Say its frae her that he sent the letter to; he'll ken brawly that Meg hadna the gumption to send him that!" said Jess candidly.
Saunders said his good-night in a manner which would certainly have destroyed all his chances with Meg had she witnessed the parting. Then he stolidly tramped away down the loaning.
Jess called after him, struck with a sudden thought. "See that ye dinna gie it to him afore the minister."
Then she put her hands beneath her apron and walked home meditating. "To be a man is to be a fool," said Jess Kissock, putting her whole experience into a sentence. Jess was a daughter of the cot; put then she was also a daughter of Eve, who had not even so much as a cot.