but nothing can save them from the isolation of their difference and their misapprehension.  It was like that with the house.  The house was admired—­ without enthusiasm—­but it was not copied.  It was felt to be outside the general need, misjudged, adventitious; and it wore its superiority in the popular view like a folly.  It was in Elgin, but not of it:  it represented a different tradition; and Elgin made the same allowance for its bedroom bells and its old-fashioned dignities as was conceded to its original master’s habit of a six-o’clock dinner, with wine.

The architectural expression of the town was on a different scale, beginning with “frame,” rising through the semidetached, culminating expensively in Mansard roofs, cupolas and modern conveniences, and blossoming, in extreme instances, into Moorish fretwork and silk portieres for interior decoration.  The Murchison house gained by force of contrast:  one felt, stepping into it, under influences of less expediency and more dignity, wider scope and more leisured intention; its shabby spaces had a redundancy the pleasanter and its yellow plaster cornices a charm the greater for the numerous close-set examples of contemporary taste in red brick which made, surrounded by geranium beds, so creditable an appearance in the West Ward.  John Murchison in taking possession of the house had felt in it these satisfactions, had been definitely penetrated and soothed by them, the more perhaps because he brought to them a capacity for feeling the worthier things of life which circumstances had not previously developed.  He seized the place with a sense of opportunity leaping sharp and conscious out of early years in the grey “wynds” of a northern Scottish town; and its personality sustained him, very privately but none the less effectively, through the worry and expense of it for years.  He would take his pipe and walk silently for long together about the untidy shrubberies in the evening, for the acute pleasure of seeing the big horse chestnuts in flower; and he never opened the hall door without a feeling of gratification in its weight as it swung under his hand.  In so far as he could, he supplemented the idiosyncrasies he found.  The drawing-room walls, though mostly bare in their old-fashioned French paper—­lavender and gilt, a grape-vine pattern—­held a few good engravings; the library was reduced to contain a single bookcase, but it was filled with English classics.  John Murchison had been made a careful man, not by nature, by the discipline of circumstances; but he would buy books.  He bought them between long periods of abstinence, during which he would scout the expenditure of an unnecessary dollar, coming home with a parcel under his arm for which he vouchsafed no explanation, and which would disclose itself to be Lockhart, or Sterne, or Borrow, or Defoe.  Mrs Murchison kept a discouraging eye upon such purchases; and when her husband brought home Chambers’s Dictionary of English Literature, after shortly and