The little brown bird of a woman was asking in a kind, interested way if he were a stranger to Edinburgh, and he was telling her how long he had been in Broxburn and what he did there, and when he mentioned cordite she made the clucking, concerned noise that elderly ladies always made when they heard that his work lay among high explosives.  And Ellen’s rootings in the untidy desk culminated in a sudden sweep of mixed paper stuff on to the floor, at which Mrs. Melville remonstrated, “Ellen, it beats me how you can be so neat with your work and such a bad, untidy girl about the house!” and Ellen exclaimed, “Och, drat the thing, it must be upstairs!” and ran out of the room with her face turned away from them.

They heard a clatter on the staircase, followed by violent noises overhead as if a chest was being dashed open and the contents flung on the floor.  “Dear, dear!” ejaculated Mrs. Melville adoringly.  She began to look him over with a maternal eye.  “For all you’ve been six months in the North, you’ve not lost your tan,” she said.

“Well, I had a good baking in Spain and South America,” he answered.  Their eyes met and they smiled.  In effect she had said, “Well, you are a fine fellow,” and he had answered, “Yes, perhaps I am.”

“I like a man to travel,” she went on, tossing her head and looking altogether fierce Ellen’s mother.  “I never go into the bank without looking at the clerks and thinking what sumphs they are, sitting on their high stools.”  She seemed to have come to some conclusion to treat him as one of the family, for she retrieved her knitting from the mantelpiece and turned her armchair more cosily to the fire, and began a sauntering of the tongue that he knew meant that she liked him.  “I hope you don’t think Ellen a wild girl, running about to these meetings all alone.  It’s not what I would like, of course, but I say nothing, for this Suffrage business keeps the bairn amused.  I’m not much of a companion to her.  I’m getting on, you see.  She was my youngest.”

“The youngest!” he exclaimed.  “I didn’t know.  I thought she was an only child.”  He flushed at this betrayal of the interest he felt in her.

“She’s that now.  But I had three others.  They all died before Ellen was born.  They sickened for influenza on a bad winter voyage my husband and I made from America.”  She mourned over some remote grievance as well as the sorrow.  “One was a boy.  He was just turned five.  That’s a snapshot of Ronnie on the mantelpiece.  A gentleman on board took it the day he was taken ill.”

He stood up to look at it.  “He must have been a jolly little chap.”