But there pressed in on him the recollection of how she had dwined away when she realised that, though he had kissed her, he did not mean to marry her.  He saw again the pale face she ever after wore; he remembered how, when he met her in the street, she used at first to droop her head and blush, until her will lifted her chin like a bearing-rein and she forced herself to a proud blank stare, while her small stature worked to make her crinoline an indignant spreading majesty behind her.  Yet, after all, she was not the only person to be inconvenienced, for he had fashed himself a great deal over the business and had slept very badly for a time.  He exhorted her reproachful ghost not to be selfish.  Besides, she had somehow brought it on herself by looking what she did; for her dark eyes, very bright, yet with a kind of bloom on them, and her full though tiny underlip had always looked as if it would be very easy to make her cry, and she had had a preference for wearing grey and brown and such modest colours that made it plain she feared to be noticed.  To display a capacity for pain so visibly was just to invite people to test it.  If she had been a girl who could look after herself, doubtless she would have got him.  He paid her the high compliment of wishing that she had, although he had done very well out of the marriages he had made, for his first wife, Annie Logan, had brought him his partnership in the firm, and his second, Christian Lawrie, had brought him a deal of money.  But Isabella had been such a bonny wee thing.

His skin became alive again, and remembered the few responding kisses that he had wheedled from her, contacts so shy that they might have been the poisings of a moth.  He shuddered, and said, “Ech!  Somebody’s walking over my grave!” though, indeed, what had happened was that his youth had risen from its grave.  He decided to be generous to Isabella and not bear her a grudge for causing him this revisiting heartache.  With the softest pity that the lot of beauty in this world should be so hard, though quite without self-condemnation, he thought how very sure the poor girl must have been that he meant to marry her before she abandoned that proud physical reserve that was the protecting integument of her sensitive soul.  That sensitiveness seemed fair ridiculous when things were going well with him; but once or twice in his life, when he had been ill, it had appeared so dreadful that he had desired either to be young again and give a different twist to things, or to die utterly and know no after-life.

No, dealing unkindly with the lasses was an ill thing to do.  It made one depressed afterwards even if it paid, just as cheating the widow and orphan did.  His eyes went back to Ellen, who had moved again.  “I must settle this business of Nelly’s,” he thought.  “Of course, Philip is quite right.  It would not be suitable.  Besides, he is getting on nicely with Bob McLennan’s girl, and that would be a capital match even for us.  But I must put things straight for my Nelly, my poor wee Nelly.”  He rose, first feeling for his crutch, for he was fair dying on his legs with the gout, and padded slowly towards the open door.