Bud: A Novel

IF Molyneux, the actor, was to blame for sending this child of ten on her journey into Scotland without convoy, how much worse was his offence that he sent no hint of her charac...

SHE was wayward, she was passionate, she was sometimes wild. She was not what, in the Pigeons' Seminary, could be called a good child, for all her sins were frankly manifest, an...

THERE was joy a few days later in the Dyces' kitchen when Peter the postman, with a snort that showed the bitterness of his feelings, passed through the window a parcel for Kate...

“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;...

THAT the child should have gone to the dame school at all was due to her Auntie Bell. From the first Miss Ailie had been dubious of the seminary, but Bell was terribly domineeri...

“I CANNA be bothered with that Shakespeare,” Kate cried, hopelessly, after many days of him; “the man's a mournin' thing! Could he not give us something cheery, with 'Come, all...

FOR only a day or two the world (in a fur-lined collar) dwelt among us, but momentous was its advent to the household Molyneux came visiting. It was as if a high tide had swept...

ANTON WULLY only briefly rang the morning bell, and gingerly, with tight-shut lips and deep nose breathings, as if its loud alarm could so be mitigated. Once before he had done...

“YOU surely did not come in these daftlike garments all the way from Edinburgh?” asked her auntie Bell, when the wig had been removed and Bud's youth was otherwise resumed.

FOLLOWING on stormy weeks had come an Indian summer, when the world was blessed with Ailie's idea of Arden weather, that keeps one wood forever green and glad with company, know...

BUT the Dyces never really knew how great and serious was the charge bequeathed to them in their brother William's daughter till they saw it all one night in March in the light...

TOO slow, far too slow, passed the lengthening days. Kate was bedded by nine to make them shorter by an hour or two, but what she took from the foot of the day she tacked to the...

SPRING came, and its quickening; forest and shrub and flower felt the new sap rise; she grew in the garden then, the child--in that old Scottish garden, sheltered lownly in the...

DANIEL DYCE had an office up the street at the windy corner facing the Cross, with two clerks in it and a boy who docketed letters and ran errands. Once upon a time there was a...

“I HEARD all about you and Auntie Bell and Uncle Dan from pop--from father,” said Bud, as they walked back to the house. She had learned already from example how sweeter sounded...

THE town's bell rang through the dark of the winter morning with queer little jolts and pauses, as if Wanton Wully Oliver, the ringer, had been jovial the night before. A blithe...

IT is another mercy, too, that in our age we learn to make the best of what aforetime might be ill to thole, as Bell made fine new garments out of old ones faded by turning them...

The world is coming for Lennox Dyce, the greedy, greedy world, youth's first and worst beguiler, that promises so much, but at the best has only bubbles to give, which borrow fo...

ALISON DYCE came lightly up the rest of the stair, whistling blithely, in spite of her sister Bell's old notion that whistling women and crowing hens are never canny. She swept...

THE orphan child of William and Mary Dyce, dead, the pair of them, in the far-off city of Chicago, stepped, quite serenely, into an astounded company. There were three Dyces in...

WHEN Kate that afternoon was told her hour was come, and that to-morrow she must meet her destined mariner, she fell into a chair, threw her apron over her head, and cried and l...

YES, that was one bright day in the dismal season, the day she tutored the Pilgrim widow in the newer commerce. There was a happy night to follow soon, and it is my grief that m...

IT was a saying of Daniel Dyce's that all the world is under one's own waistcoat. We have a way of spaeing fortunes in the North, when young, in which we count the waistcoat but...

SUDDENLY all the town began to talk of the pride of Kate MacNeill. She took to wearing all her best on week-days, abandoned the kitchen window, and ruined an old-established tra...

SHE was a lucky lassie, this of ours, to have come home to her father's Scotland on that New Year's Day, for there is no denying that it is not always gay in Scotland, contrary...

FOR all the regrets of increasing age there is one alleviation among many, that days apart from those we love pass the quicker, even as our hurrying years. Thus it is that separ...

“I wasn't charging you,” said her mistress. “Dear me! it must be an awful thing, a guilty conscience! I was thinking to give you--and maybe Lennox, if she would not mind--a less...

WORKING thus, furiously, at the task of love, which, in all it does for the youth it cherishes, must ever be digging a grave for its own delight, Bell could forget, for periods,...

IT took two maids to fill Kate's place in the Dyces' household--one for the plain boiling of potatoes and the other for her pious atmosphere, as the lawyer argued, and a period...

FORTUNATELY Kate's marriage came to distract them for a while from the thought of Bud's future. The essential house had been found that was suitable for a captain, yet not too d...

WHEN Miss Bell rose, as she did in a day or two, bantered into a speedy convalescence by Ailie and Dan, it was to mark Bud's future holidays on the calendar, and count the month...

BELL liked the creature, as I say, not a little because she saw in him whence came some part of Bud's jocosity and most of the daftlike language (though kind of clever, too, she...

IT was a wet night in November. With a chuckle of horse's hoofs on shining streets, Dan Dyce, with Bell and Ailie, drove from Molyneux's fine new home to the temple of his forme...

“THE talk of the whole of London! The beauteous Lady Anne herself's not in it with her!” said Will Oliver, scratching behind his ears. “Man, is it no' just desperate? But I'll w...