prick her smooth skin.  Yet these apprehensions were quite uncoloured by any emotional tone.  It was simply that she was essentially conspicuous, that one had to watch her as one watches a very tall man going through a crowd.  Even now, instead of registering disapproval at her moodiness, he was looking at her red hair and thinking how it radiated flame through the twilight of her dark corner, although in the sunlight it always held the softness of the dusk.  That was characteristic of her tendency always to differ from the occasion.  He had once seen her at a silly sort of picnic where everybody was making a great deal of noise and playing rounders, and she had sat alone under a tree.  And once, as he was walking along Princes Street on a cruel day when there was an easterly ha’ar blowing off the Firth, she had stepped towards him out of the drizzle, not seeing him but smiling sleepily.  It was strange how he remembered all these things, for he had never liked her very much.

He put his papers on the table and sat down by the fire.  “Well, what should happen?  No news is good news, I’ve heard!”

She continued to disclose herself to him without the impediment of shyness, for he was unattractive to her because he had an Edinburgh accent and always carried an umbrella.  He was so like hundreds of young men in the town, dark and sleek-headed and sturdily under-sized, with an air of sagacity and consciously shrewd eyes under a projecting brow, that it seemed like uttering one’s complaint before a jury or some other representative body.  She believed, too, that he was not one of the impeccable and happy to whom one dare not disclose one’s need for pity, for she was sure that the clipped speech that slid through his half-opened mouth was a sign that secretly he was timid and ashamed.  So she cried honestly, “I’m so dull that I’ll die.  You and Mr. James are awfully good to me, and I can put up with Mr. Morrison, though he’s a doited old thing, and I like my work, but coming here in the morning and going home at night, day in and day out, it drives me crazy.  I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but I want to run away to new places and see new people.  This morning I was running to catch the tram and I saw the old wife who lives in the wee house by the cycle shop had put a bit heather in a glass bottle at the window, and do you know, I was near turning my back and going off to the Pentlands and letting the work go hang!”

They were both law-abiding people.  They saw the gravity of her case.

“Not that I want the Pentlands.  Dear knows I love the place, but I want something more than those old hills.  I want to go somewhere right far away.  The sight of a map makes me sick.  And then I hear a band play—­not the pipes, they make me think of Walter Scott’s poetry, which I never could bear, but a band.  I feel that if I followed it it would lead me somewhere that I would like to go.  And the posters.  There’s one at the Waverley station—­Venice.  I could tear the thing down.  Did you ever go to Italy, Mr. Philip?”