But he was really quite old, nearly seventy, and well on the way to lose the human obsession of the importance of humanity; so his attention began to note, as if they were not less significant than Ellen’s agony, the motes that were dancing in the bar of pale autumn sunshine that lay athwart the room.  “It is a queer thing,” his mind droned on, “that when I came here when I was young I saw there was a peck of dust in every room, and I blamed old Mr. Logan for keeping on yon dirty old wife of a caretaker.  I said to myself that when I was the master I would have it like a new pin and put a decent buddy in the basement.  And now Mr. Logan is long dead, and the old wife is long dead, and I have had things my own way these many years, but the place is still foul as a lum, and I keep on yon slut of a Mrs. Powell.  Ah well!  Ah well!” He pondered, with a Scotch sort of enjoyment, on the frustration of youth’s hopes and the progress of mortality in himself, until a movement of Ellen’s bright head, such a jerk as might have been caused by a silent sob, brought his thoughts back to beauty and his small personal traffic with it.

“I do not know why she should mind me of Isabella Kingan.  She is not like her.  Isabella was black as a wee crow.  It is just that they’re both very bonny.  I wonder what has happened to Isabella.  She must be sixty-five.  I saw her once in Glasgow, in Sauchiehall Street, after she was married, but she would not speak.  Yet what else could I have done?  I had my way to make, and it was known up and down the length of Edinburgh that her mother kept a sweetie shop in Leith Walk, and she had a cousin who was a policeman in the town.  No, no, it would not have been a suitable marriage.”

He moved restlessly in his chair, vexed by a sense of guilt, which although he immediately mitigated it into a suspicion that he might have behaved more wisely, made his memory maliciously busy opening doors which he had believed he had locked.  But he was so expert in the gymnastic art of standing well with himself and the world that he could turn each recollected incident to a cause of self-approbation before he had begun to flush.  For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns’ love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny warm dove’s body to his arms.  Never in all the forty-five intervening years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety darkness and its topmost half shining ghostly as plaster does in moonlight, without his hands remembering the queer pleasure it had been to crush crisp muslin, without his heart remembering the joy it had been to coax from primness its first consent to kisses.  Before he could reproach himself for having turned that perfect hour into a shame to her who gave it by his later treachery, he began to reflect what a steady young fellow he had been to have known no other amorous incident in all his unmarried days than this innocent fondling on a summer’s night.