be mad not to see that she would rather die than let any man on earth touch her in any way, and least of all Yaverland, whom she hated.  There came before her eyes the memory of that bluish bloom on his lips and jaw which she had noticed the first time she saw him, and she rocked herself to and fro in a passion of tears at the thought she was suspected of close contact with this loathsome maleness.  She felt as if there was buried in her bosom a harp with many strings, and each string was snapping separately.

“Och, votes for women!” she said wearily; and tried to make herself remember that after all there were some unstained noble things in the world by singing whisperingly a verse from the Women’s Marseillaise.  “There’s many singing that song to-day in prison that would be glad to sit and breathe fresh air and look at a fine view as you’re doing, so you ought to be thankful!” And indeed the view of the Castle did just for that moment distract her from the business of weeping, for there had been a certain violent alteration of the weather.  The autumn sunshine, which had never been more than a sarcasm on the part of a thoroughly unpleasant day, had failed altogether, and Edinburgh had become a series of corridors through which there rushed a trampling wind.  It set the dead leaves rising from the pavement in an exasperated, seditious way, and let them ride dispersedly through the eddying air far above the heads of the clambering figures that, up and down the side-street, stood arrested and, it seemed, flattened, as if they had been spatchcocked by the advancing wind and found great difficulty in folding themselves up again.  She looked at their struggles with contempt.  They were funny wee men.  They were not like Yaverland.  Now, he was a fine man.  She thought proudly of the enormousness of his chest and shoulders, and imagined the tremendous thudding thing the heartbeat must be that infused with blood such hugeness.  He must be one of the most glorious men who ever lived.  It surely was not often that a man was perfect in every way physically and mentally.

She turned away and hid her face against the shutters, weeping bitterly.  But her mind had to follow him in a kind of dream, as he walked on, masterfully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival.  In every way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.