The young man began a gesture of despair, which he restrained lest those inimical eyes should lift again.  This was not a place, he well knew, where sentimental values held good, where the part of a young and unprotected girl would be taken against the son of the house out of any mawkish feeling that youth or weakness of womanhood deserved especial tenderness.  It was the stronghold of his own views, its standards were his own.  And even here it was insisted that Ellen was a person of value.  There seemed nothing in the world that would give him any help in his urgent need to despise her, to think of her as dirt, to throw on her the onus of all the vileness that had happened to him.  He broke out, “If she’s a good girl she ought to behave as such!  You must speak to her, father.  There’ll be a scandal in the town!”

Mr. Mactavish James seemed to have withdrawn his mind from the discussion, for he had taken out his appointment diary, which could surely have nothing to do with the case.  But when Mr. Philip had turned towards the door, the old man said, amiably enough, “Ay, I’ll speak to Nelly.  I’ll speak to her on Monday afternoon.  The morning I must be up at the Court of Session.  But in the afternoon I’ll give the girl a word.”

It was on the tip of Mr. Philip’s tongue to cry, “Thank you, father, thank you!” but he remembered that this was merely a matter of office discipline that was being settled, and no personal concern of his.  So he said, “I think it would be wise, father,” and went out of the room.  He ran upstairs whistling.  It would be a great come-down for her that had always been such a pet of his father’s to be spoken to about her conduct....

II

The door had swung ajar, so Mr. Mactavish James in his seat at his desk was able to look into the further room and keep an eye on Ellen, who was sitting with her back to him, supporting her bright head on her hand and staring fixedly down at something on the table.  Her appearance entertained him, as it always did.  He chuckled over the shapeless blue overall, just like a bairn’s, that she wore on her neat wee figure, and the wild shining hair which resembled nothing so much as a tamarisk hedge in a high wind, though she would have barked like a terrier at anyone who suggested that it was not as neatly a done head as any in Edinburgh.  But he was very anxious about her.  For some moments now she had not moved, and this immobility was so unnatural in her that he knew she must be somehow deeply hurt, as one who sees a bird quite still knows that it is dead or dying.  “Tuts, tuts,” he sighed.  “This must be looked to.  She is the bonniest lassie that I’ve ever seen.  Excepting Isabella Kingan.”  His right hand, which had been lying listlessly on the desk before him, palm upwards, turned over when he thought of Isabella Kingan.  The fingers crooked, and it became an instrument of will, like the hand of a young man.