She slouched across the room to the window, laid her cheek to the glass, and said rapidly, “It is bad weather.  It is bad weather here an awful lot of the time.  Mr. Yaverland says there is a place in Peru where it is always spring.  That would be bonny.”  She felt relieved and warmed as soon as she had mentioned his name, and sat down easily in the window-seat and smiled back at the old man.

“Ehem!  So this Mr. Yaverland has surveyed mankind from China to Peru, as the great Dr. Johnson says.”

But she could not speak of Yaverland again so soon.  She tried to make time by wrangling.  “Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson?  He was just a rude old thing.”

“He was a man of sense, lassie, a man of sense.”

“What’s sense?” she cried, and flung wide her arms.  Her body pricked with a general emotion that was not relevant to the words she spoke, and indeed she was not quite aware what those were.  “Sense isn’t sitting in your chair all day and ruining the coats of your—­of your digestion drinking too much tea and contradicting everybody and being rude to Mrs. Thrale when the poor body married again.”

“It was a fule’s marriage,” said Mr. Mactavish James; “the widow of a substantial man taking up wi’ an Italian fiddler.”

“Marriage with one man’s no worse than marriage with another, the way they all are,” said Ellen darkly, and got back to her argument.  “And hating the Scotch and democracy, and saying blunt foolish things as if they were blunt wise ones—­that’s not sense.  And if it were, what’s the good of living to be sensible?  It’s like living to have five fingers on your hand.  And life’s so short!  Mr. James, does it never worry you dreadfully that life is so short?  I wonder how we all bear up about it.  One ought to live for adventure.  I want to go away, right away.  There are such lots of lovely places where there are palms, and people get romantically shot, and there’s a town somewhere where poppies grow on the roofs of mosques.  I would like to see that.  And queer people—­masked Touaregs—­”

“Lassie, you are blethering,” said Mr. Mactavish James, “this is a pairfect salad of foreign pairts.”

It had to come out.  “Mr. Yaverland says Peru is lovely.  He has been both sides of the Andes.  He liked Peru.  There are silver mines at Iquique and etairnal spring at the place whose name I have forgotten.  Funny that I should forget the name of the one place on airth where there is etairnal spring!  If I had all the money in the world I would not be able to go there because I have forgotten its name!” She laughed sobbingly, and went on.  “And he’s been in Brazil.  He lived for a time in Rio de Janeiro.”  She stared fixedly at her mental image of the fateful house where there was a broken statue on a bier, shook herself, and went on.  “And he’s travelled in the forest.  He’s seen streams covered with the big leaves of Victoria Regia like they have it in the Botanical Gardens, and egrets standing on