she had married badly, and had allowed consciousness of that fact to colour her manner when they had run against each other in Princes Street.  Ellen was trying to imitate the expression by which this bourgeoise had given her mother to understand that the interview need not long be continued.  She caught it, she thought, but it did not really help.  There was still this pressure of a flood of tears behind her eyes.  She looked out of the window and exclaimed, “It’s getting dark!” She said it peevishly, as if the sun’s descent was the last piece of carelessness on the part of a negligent universe.  And as her eye explored the dusk and saw that the bright spheres round the lamps were infested by wandering ghosts of wind-blown humidity she thought of her walk home up the Mound and what it would be like on this night of gusts and damp.  “That puts the lid on!” her heart said bitterly, and the first tears oozed.  Somehow she must go at once.  She said thinly and quaveringly, “It’s getting dark.  Surely it’s time I was away home?”

There was a clock on the mantelpiece which told it was not yet half-past four, but they both looked away from it.  “Ay,” said Mr. Mactavish James cheerfully, “you must run away home.  I’ll not have it said I drive a bairn to death with late hours.  Good evening, lassie.”  He was so terrified by the intensity of her emotion that he had given up playing his fish.  There stabbed a question through his heart.  Had Isabella Kingan suffered thus?

“Good evening, Mr. James,” she said brightly, and went out into the hall letting the door swing to, and pulled on her coat and tam-o’-shanter in the darkness.  Now that it did not matter if she cried, she did not feel nearly so much like crying.  “That’s the way things always are,” she snorted, and began to hum the Marseillaise defiantly as she buttoned up her coat.  But though she was not seen here, she was not alone.  There pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace.  Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac words.  With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose, that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she remembered the bluish bloom that had been on his chin the first night she ever saw him.  At that she brought her clenched fist down on her other palm and sobbed with hate.  He had brought all this upon her.

And hearing that, Mr. Mactavish James hobbled towards the door, purring endearments.  He was better now.  That anguished melody of speculation as to Isabella Kingan’s heart he had played over again with the tempo rubato and the pressed loud pedal of sentimentality, and it was now no more than agreeably affecting as a Scotch song ... being kind to the wean for the sake of her who was my sweethairt in auld lang syne....