day the two girls came home discouraged from their house-hunting. “If ever,” said Barbara, “I valued Rutherfurd it is now. Let’s give up this quixotic search for a habitable house, store our furniture, and set off on our travels. Thank goodness, there are still hotels!”
They had almost decided to do this when one day by the evening post came a letter from the helpful Mr. Haynes, enclosing a card to see a house which he thought they might consider worth looking at. It was in the town of Kirkmeikle, in Fife, and was called the Harbour House.
“Far enough away, anyway,” was Barbara’s comment.
“Fife,” said Nicole, and, wrinkling her nose, she quoted: “I never lik’it the Kingdom o’ Fife.”
“Still,” Barbara said, “we might go and see the place. What d’you think, Aunt Jane? Have you any objection to Fife?”
Lady Jane looked up from the book of old photographs she was poring over.
“Fife,” she said. “Your uncle and I once paid a very pleasant visit to people who lived, I think, near Falkland. . . . Oh no, dear, I’ve no objection. . . . There are no hills to speak of in Fife, and I seem to remember that it smelt rather oddly—linoleum, is it? But otherwise, I’m sure it would be a pleasant place to live.”
“Dear contented one,” said Nicole, “the smell is confined to big towns with factories. Kirkmeikle is a little town in the East Neuk, wherever that may be. I grant the lack of hills, but if we find we can’t live without them I daresay we could always let the house. People love to spend their holidays near golf-links. I must say the name rather appeals to me—the Harbour House.”
Barbara was studying the lawyer’s letter.
“We may have a chance of it,” she said, “for evidently Mr. Haynes thinks it’s a house that will not appeal to every one. It belonged to an old Mrs. Swinton who died in it a few months ago. Swinton’s a good name: probably she was connected with the Berwickshire Swintons. . . . Well, shall we start off to-morrow morning? It’ll mean leaving by the first train, and we may have to stay the night in Edinburgh. . . . I’ll see how the trains go from the Waverley——”
It was a bright autumn morning with a touch of frost when Barbara and Nicole crossed the Forth Bridge and looked down at the ships, and saw the sun on the red-tiled houses, the woods, the cleaned harvest-fields, and the long stretch of shining water.
“It’s pretty,” said Barbara, almost grudgingly “Living inland I had forgotten the magic of the sea. There’s such a feeling of space, and a sort of breath-taking freshness!”
“Oh yes,” Nicole agreed, gazing down into the sparkling depths, “the East Coast is fresh and caller, and beautiful in its way. The funny thing is, I never have been fond of the sea, perhaps because I’m such a wretched sailor. But, anyway, I prefer the East Coast sea to the West Highland lochs.” She leaned back in her seat and smiled at her cousin. “Shall I ever forget going out with Morag MacLeod on that awful loch of theirs? The old boatman warned us not to go for the weather was most uncertain, and it’s a dangerous place, full of currents and things, and Morag is one of the most reckless of God’s creatures. I felt perfectly certain I was going to be drowned, and the thought filled me with fury, for I can’t imagine a less desirable death than to go down in a horrible black West Highland loch, with sea-birds calling drearily above one. Morag, I knew, would save herself, and I could see her bearing my death so nobly, quoting a lot of stuff with a sob in it. I almost wept with self-pity as I clutched my coat round me with one hand, and held on with the other to some part of that frail craft. How I sighed for my own solid Border glens with no wretched lochs!”
“What about St. Mary’s? And the Loch o’ the Lowes?”
“Oh, but they’re clear and sunny and comparatively shallow, with no towering black mountains round them.”
“Loch Skene is dark enough.”
“Yes, but small. You wouldn’t think of yachting on it. . . . I’ve never stayed again with Morag, she’s too comfortless. I like being in the open air as well as any one, and there’s nothing nicer than a whole day tramping or fishing or climbing, but in the house I expect comfort. When I come home I want great fires, and abundance of hot water, and large soft chairs, and the best of food. One day—have I told you this before?—No. Well, one day she made me start off with her at nine in the morning, after a wretched breakfast, half cold, eaten in the summer-house. It was a chilly, misty morning, inclined to rain, and we plunged along through bogs and wet heather until we came to a loch where a keeper was waiting for us with a boat. We fished for hours, then ate some sodden sandwiches, and bits of chocolate. All the time Morag was chanting about the joys of the Open Road till I was sick of her. We didn’t catch any fish either. About four o’clock we started for home, very stiff and wet about the legs, and I thought I could just manage to live till five o’clock, and tea and a fire. A mile from home Morag suddenly had an idea—a thoroughly vicious one, I thought. ‘We’ve got some sandwiches left,’ she said, ‘let’s sit here and eat them. You don’t want to go home and eat hot scones stuffily by a fire, do you?’ Didn’t I? I positively ached to, but I’m such a naturally polite creature that, though I could have felled her where she stood, I only murmured resignation. Happily I was saved by her father. We met him at that moment of crisis, and he laughed to scorn the thought of mouldy sandwiches, and insisted on us going back to tea.”
“I should think so,” said Barbara. “Morag was always a posing donkey, and, I should think, no use as a housekeeper.”
Nicole shook her head. “None in the world. A comfortless mistress makes careless servants, and the fires were always on the point of going out, and the hot water never more than tepid. The only time I was comfortable and warm all that week was when I was in bed hugging a hot-water bottle. I was sorry for Morag’s father. It’s wretched for a man to live in a badly run house.”
She stopped and looked at her cousin. “My word, Babs, you’d be a godsend to any man as a housekeeper.”
“Only as a housekeeper?”
“My dear, no. As everything, companion, friend, counsellor, sweetheart—wife.”
They changed at Thornton, and in due course reached their destination. Kirkmeikle, they found, was a little grey town huddled on green braes, overhanging the harbour. There was one long street with shops, which meandered downhill from the station; some rows of cottages and a few large villas made up the rest of it. The villas were conspicuous and wonderfully ugly, and the two girls looked at them in dismay. Was one of those atrocities the house they had come to look at?
Barbara settled the question by stopping a small boy and demanding to know where the Harbour House was.
“Ye gang doon to the harbour an’ it’s the hoose that’s lookin’ at ye.”
“Quite so,” said Nicole, heaving a sigh of relief, and turning her back with alacrity on the red villas.
Proceeding down the winding street they came at last to the sea-front. A low wall, flat on the top, ran along the side of the road, and beyond that was the sea. At high tide the water came up to the wall, at other times there was a stretch of firm sandy beach.
A tall, white-washed house stood at the end of the street leading down to the sea. The front door was in the street, and to the harbour it presented a long front punctuated with nine small paned windows; the roof was high and pointed, and there were crow-step gables.
“What a wise child that
