“No.  I go with the girls to Germany every summer.”

“My patience!” said Ellen bitterly.  “The way the world is!  The people who can afford to go to Italy go to Germany.  And I—­I’ll die if I don’t get away.”

“Och, I often feel like this,” said Mr. Philip.  “I just take a week-end off at a hydro.”

“A hydro!” snorted Ellen.  “It’s something more like the French Revolution I’m wanting.  Something grand and coloured.  Swords, and people being rescued, and things like that.”

“There’s nothing going on like that now,” he said stolidly, “and we ought to be thankful for it.”

“I know everything’s over in Europe,” she agreed sadly, “but there’s revolutions in South America.  I’ve read about them in Richard Harding Davis.  Did ever you read him?  Mind you, I’m not saying he’s an artist, but the man has force.  He makes you long to go.”

“A dirty place,” said Mr. Philip.

“What does that matter, where there’s life?  I feel—­I feel”—­she wrung her inky brown hands—­“as if I should die if something didn’t happen at once:  something big, something that would bang out like the one o’clock gun up at the Castle.  And nothing will.  Nothing ever will!”

“Och, well,” he comforted her, “you’re young yet, you know.”

“Young!” cried Ellen, and suddenly wept.  If this was youth—!

He bent down and played with the fire-irons.  It was odd how he didn’t want to go away, although she was in distress.  “Some that’s been in South America don’t find it to their taste,” he said.  “The fellow that’s coming to-night wants to sell some property in Rio de Janeiro because he doesn’t mean to go back.”

“Ah, how can he do that?” asked Ellen unsteadily.  The tears she was too proud to wipe away made her look like a fierce baby.  “Property in Rio de Janeiro!  It’s like being related to someone in ‘Treasure Island.’”

“‘Treasure Island!’ Imph!” He had seen his father draw Ellen often enough to know how to do it, though he himself would never have paid enough attention to her mental life to discover it.  “You’re struck on that Robert Louis Stevenson, but he wasn’t so much.  My Aunt Phemie was with him at Mr. Robert Thompson’s school in Heriot Row, and she says he was an awful young blackguard, playing with the keelies all he could and gossiping with the cabmen on the rank.  She wouldn’t have a word to say to him, and grandfather would never ask him to the house, not even when all the English were licking his boots.  I’m not much on these writing chaps myself.”  He made scornful noises and crossed his legs as though he had disposed of art.

“And who,” asked Ellen, with temper, “might your Aunt Phemie be?  There’ll not be much in the papers when she’s laid by in Trinity Cemetery, I’m thinking!  The impairtinence of it!  All these Edinburgh people ought to go on their knees and thank their Maker that just once, just once in that generation, He let something decent come out of Edinburgh!” She turned away from him and laid her cheek against the oak shutter.