than the snatching of the Church funds from the U.F.’s by the Wee Frees.  It appeared to her an indication of the quality of the town’s life that they spoke of their churches by initials just as the English, she had learned from the Socialist papers, spoke of their trade unions.  And for personalities there were innumerable clergymen and Sir Thomas Gilzean, Edinburgh’s romantic draper, who talked French with a facility that his fellow townsmen suspected of being a gift acquired on the brink of the pit, and who had a long wriggling waist which suggested that he was about to pick up the tails of his elegant frock-coat and dance.  He was light indeed, but not enough to express the lightness of which life was capable; while the darker side of destiny was as inadequately represented by AEneas Walkinshaw, the last Jacobite, whom at the very moment Ellen could see standing under the lamp-post at the corner, in the moulting haberdashery of his wind-draggled kilts and lace ruffles, cramming treasonable correspondence into a pillar-box marked G.R....  She wanted people to be as splendid as the countryside, as noble as the mountains, as variable within the limits of beauty as the Firth of Forth, and this was what they were really like.  She wept undisguisedly.

II

“What ails you, Miss Melville?” asked Mr. Philip James.  He had lit the gas and seen that she was crying.

At first she said, “Nothing.”  But there grew out of her gratitude to this family a feeling that it was necessary, or at least decent, that she should always answer them with the cleanest candour.  As one rewards the man who has restored a lost purse by giving him some of the coins in it, so she shared with them, by the most exact explanation of her motives whenever they were asked for, the self which they had saved.  So she added, “It’s just that I’m bored.  Nothing ever happens to me!”

Mr. Philip had hoped she was going to leave it at that “Nothing,” and bore her a grudge for her amplification at the same time that the way she looked when she made it swept him into sympathy.  Indeed, he always felt about the lavish gratitude with which Ellen laid her personality at the disposal of the firm rather as the Englishman who finds the Chinaman whom he saved from death the day before sitting on his verandah in the expectation of being kept for the rest of his life that his rescuer has forced upon him.  It was true that she was an excellent shorthand-typist, but she vexed the decent grey by her vividness.  The sight of her through an open door, sitting at her typewriter in her blue linen overall, dispersed one’s thoughts; it was as if a wireless found its waves jammed by another instrument.  Often he found himself compelled to abandon his train of ideas and apprehend her experiences:  to feel a little tired himself if she drooped over her machine, to imagine, as she pinned on her tam-o’-shanter and ran down the stairs, how the cold air would presently