The Kerr sisters took Miss Brodie’s intrusion quite meekly, and that they were so unquestioning about any authority which imposed itself upon them was the very reason why they also did not hesitate later on to answer the subsequent questions of Miss Gaunt. Meantime Miss Brodie set about feeding Mr. Lowther up, and, since this meant her passing Saturday afternoons at Cramond, the Brodie set was invited to go, two by two, one pair every week, to visit her in Mr. Lowther’s residence where he smiled and patted their hair or pulled pretty Jenny’s ringlets, looking meanwhile for reproof or approval, or some such thing, at brown-eyed Jean Brodie. She gave them tea while he smiled; and he frequently laid down his cup and saucer, went and sat at the piano and burst into song. He sang:

March, march Ettrick and Teviotdale,

Why

the de’il dinna ye march

forward

in order?

March, march, Eskdale and Liddesdale,

All the Blue Bonnets are bound for the Border.

At the end of the song he would smile his overcome and bashful smile and take his teacup again, looking up under his ginger eyebrows at Jean Brodie to see what she felt about him at the current moment. She was Jean to him, a fact that none of the Brodie set thought proper to mention to anyone.

She reported to Sandy and Jenny: “I made short work of those Kerr sisters. They were starving him. Now it is I who see to the provisions. I am a descendant, do not forget, of Willie Brodie, a man of substance, a cabinet maker and designer of gibbets, a member of the Town Council of Edinburgh and a keeper of two mistresses who bore him five children between them. Blood tells. He played much dice and fighting cocks. Eventually he was a wanted man for having robbed the Excise Office — not that he needed the money, he was a night burglar only for the sake of the danger in it. Of course, he was arrested abroad and was brought back to the Tolbooth prison, but that was mere chance. He died cheerfully on a gibbet of his own devising in seventeen-eighty-eight. However all this may be, it is the stuff I am made of, and I have brooked and shall brook no nonsense from Miss Ellen and Miss Alison Kerr.”

Mr. Lowther sang:

O mother, mother, make my bed,

O make it soft and narrow,

For my true love died for me today.

I’ll die for him tomorrow.

Then he looked at Miss Brodie. She was, however, looking at a chipped rim of a teacup. “Mary Macgregor must have chipped it,” she said. “Mary was here last Sunday with Eunice and they washed up together. Mary must have chipped it.”