e turned back.
"Mistress McQumpha," he cried, and whistled.

"Run, Leeby, run," said Jess, excitedly.

Leeby hastened to the door, and came back with a registered letter.

"Registerdy," she cried in triumph, and Jess, with fond hands, opened
the letter. By the time I came down the money was hid away in a box
beneath the bed, where not even Leeby could find it, and Jess was on
her chair hugging the letter. She preserved all her registered
envelopes.

This was the first time I had been in Thrums when Jamie was expected
for his ten days' holiday, and for a week we discussed little else.
Though he had written saying when he would sail for Dundee, there was
quite a possibility of his appearing on the brae at any moment, for he
liked to take Jess and Leeby by surprise. Hendry there was no
surprising, unless he was in the mood for it, and the coolness of him
was one of Jess's grievances. Just two years earlier Jamie came north
a week before his time, and his father saw him from the window.
Instead of crying out in amazement or hacking his face, for he was
shaving at the time. Henry calmly wiped his razor on the window-sill,
and said--

"Ay, there's Jamie."

Jamie was a little disappointed at being seen in this way, for he had
been looking forward for four and forty hours to repeating the
sensation of the year before. On that occasion he had got to the door
unnoticed, where he stopped to listen. I daresay he checked his
breath, the better to catch his mother's voice, for Jess being an
invalid, Jamie thought of her first. He had Leeby sworn to write the
truth about her, but many an anxious hour he had on hearing that she
was "complaining fell (considerably) about her back the day," Leeby, as
he knew, being frightened to alarm him. Jamie, too, had given his
promise to tell exactly how he was keeping, but often he wrote that he
was "fine" when Jess had her doubts. When Hendry wrote he spread
himself over the table, and said that Jess was "juist about it," or
"aff and on," which does not tell much. So Jamie hearkened painfully
at the door, and by and by heard his mother say to Leeby that she was
sure the teapot was running out. Perhaps that voice was as sweet to
him as the music of a maiden to her lover, but Jamie did not rush into
his mother's arms. Jess has told me with a beaming face how craftily
he behaved. The old man, of lungs that shook Thrums by night, who went
from door to door selling firewood, had a