and he glided toward it, signing to Elspeth to accompany him.  They were now too near Double Dykes for speaking to be safe, but he tapped his head as a warning to her to remove her hat, for a woman’s head-gear always reaches a window in front of its wearer, and he touched his cold iron and passed it to her as if it were a snuff-mull.  Thus fortified, they approached the window fearfully, holding hands and stepping high, like a couple in a minuet.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PAINTED LADY

It had been the ordinary dwelling room of the unknown poor, the mean little “end”—­ah, no, no, the noblest chamber in the annals of the Scottish nation.  Here on a hard anvil has its character been fashioned and its history made at rush-lights and its God ever most prominent.  Always within reach of hands which trembled with reverence as they turned its broad page could be found the Book that is compensation for all things, and that was never more at home than on bare dressers and worm-eaten looms.  If you were brought up in that place and have forgotten it, there is no more hope for you.

But though still recalling its past, the kitchen into which Tommy and Elspeth peered was trying successfully to be something else.  The plate-rack had been a fixture, and the coffin-bed and the wooden bole, or board in the wall, with its round hole through which you thrust your hand when you wanted salt, and instead of a real mantelpiece there was a quaint imitation one painted over the fireplace.  There were some pieces of furniture too, such as were usual in rooms of the kind, but most of them, perhaps in ignorance, had been put to novel uses, like the plate-rack, where the Painted Lady kept her many pretty shoes instead of her crockery.  Gossip said she had a looking-glass of such prodigious size that it stood on the floor, and Tommy nudged Elspeth to signify, “There it is!” Other nudges called her attention to the carpet, the spinet, a chair that rocked like a cradle, and some smaller oddities, of which the queerest was a monster velvet glove hanging on the nail that by rights belonged to the bellows.  The Painted Lady always put on this glove before she would touch the coals, which diverted Tommy, who knew that common folk lift coals with their bare hands while society uses the fringe of its second petticoat.

It might have been a boudoir through which a kitchen and bedroom had wandered, spilling by the way, but though the effect was tawdry, everything had been rubbed clean by that passionate housewife, Grizel.  She was on her knees at present ca’ming the hearth-stone a beautiful blue, and sometimes looking round to address her mother, who was busy among her plants and cut flowers.  Surely they were know-nothings who called this woman silly, and blind who said she painted.  It was a little face all of one color, dingy pale, not chubby, but retaining the soft contours of a child’s