But here a heavy step descending the stair just outside the room attracted her attention, and checking the flow of her speech perforce, with three ungainly strides she reached the landing.
“Watty Witherspail! Watty!” she called after the footsteps down the stair.
“Yes, mem,” answered a gruff voice from below.
“Watty, whan ye fess the bit boxie, jist pit a hemmer an’ a puckle nails i’ your pooch to men’ the hen-hoose-door. The tane maun be atten’t till as weel ’s the tither.”
“The bit boxie” was the coffin of her third cousin Griselda Campbell, whose body lay in the room on her left hand as she called down the stair. Into that on her right Miss Horn now re-entered, to rejoin Mrs Mellis, the wife of the principal draper in the town, who had called ostensibly to condole with her, but really to see the corpse.
“Aih! she was taen yoong!” sighed the visitor, with long-drawn tones and a shake of the head, implying that therein lay ground of complaint, at which poor mortals dared but hint.
“No that yoong,” returned Miss Horn. “She was upo’ the edge o’ aucht an’ thirty.”
“Weel, she had a sair time o’ ’t.”
“No that sair, sae far as I see—an’ wha sud ken better? She’s had a bien doon-sittin’ (sheltered quarters), and sud hae had as lang ’s I was to the fore. Na, na; it was nowther sae yoong nor yet sae sair.”
“Aih! but she was a patient cratur wi’ a’ flesh,” persisted Mrs Mellis, as if she would not willingly be foiled in the attempt to extort for the dead some syllable of acknowledgment from the lips of her late companion.