“Into partnership!” cried Kirsteen in astonishment.
“Say nothing hastily, my dear--just go to your bed upon it. And we will not compromise an honoured name. We’ll say Miss Brown and Miss Kirsteen--the English, who are very slow at the uptake, will think it’s your family name, and that will compromise nobody,” Miss Jean said.
It is difficult to calculate the exact moment at which it shall be found out by the members of a family that one of them has disappeared and gone away. It is easy to account for temporary absence: to think that the missing one has walked out too far, has been detained by some visit, has somehow been withdrawn unexpectedly and not by any will of his, from home. Kirsteen did not appear at breakfast; there were a few questions, “Where is Kirsteen?” “She will be with my mother.” Her mother on the other hand was asking Jeanie who had taken up her breakfast, “Where is Kirsteen?” “She is gone out for a walk--or something,” said Jeanie. It was not till after the second meal, at which there was no sign of her, that anything like alarm was excited. “Where is Kirsteen?” her father cried in what the children called his Bull of Bashan’s voice. “I am not my sister’s keeper--no doubt she’s just away on one of her rovings,” said Mary, whose mind however by this time was full of curiosity. She had been early struck by the complete disappearance of Kirsteen and every trace of her from about the place. Neither in the glen, nor by the linn, nor in the garden, was there any sign of her, no evidence that she had passed by either in parlour or in kitchen. She had not been in her mother’s room. Mrs. Douglas had already asked for more than a dozen times where was Kirsteen?--requiring her for a hundred things. It was only however when she found Marg’ret anxiously attempting to do Kirsteen’s special business, to pick up the lost stitches in Mrs. Douglas’s knitting, to arrange her pillows and help her to move that a real suspicion darted through Mary’s mind. Could Kirsteen have gone away? and could Marg’ret know of it? On being interrogated the boys and Jeanie declared that neither on the way to school nor at the merchant’s which they had passed on their return home, had any trace of her been seen. And Mary thought that Marg’ret’s eyes were heavy, that she looked like a person who had been up all night, or who had been crying a great deal, and observed, which was more extraordinary still, that she alone showed no curiosity about Kirsteen. Had all been natural it was she who would have been most easily alarmed. This acute observation helped Mary to the full truth, or at least to as much of it as it was possible to find out. “Where’s Kirsteen?” she said suddenly in Marg’ret’s ear, coming down upon her unawares, after she had left Mrs. Douglas’s room.