Bob and I buried the Game Chicken that night (we had not much of a tea) in the back-green of his house, in Melville Street, No. 17, with considerable gravity and silence; and being at the time in the Iliad, and, like all boys, Trojans, we called him Hector, of course.

Six years have passed,—­a long time for a boy and a dog:  Bob Ainslie is off to the wars; I am a medical student, and clerk at Minto House Hospital.  Rab I saw almost every week, on the Wednesday; and we had much pleasant intimacy.  I found the way to his heart by frequent scratching of his huge head, and an occasional bone.  When I did not notice him he would plant himself straight before me, and stand wagging that bud of a tail, and looking up, with his head a little to the one side.  His master I occasionally saw; he used to call me “Maister John,” but was laconic as any Spartan.

One fine October afternoon, I was leaving the hospital, when I saw the large gate open, and in walked Rab, with that great and easy saunter of his.  He looked as if taking general possession of the place; like the Duke of Wellington entering a subdued city, satiated with victory and peace.  After him came Jess, now white from age, with her cart, and in it a woman carefully wrapped up,—­the carrier leading the horse anxiously, and looking back.  When he saw me, James (for his name was James Noble) made a curt and grotesque “boo,” and said, “Maister John, this is the mistress; she’s got a trouble in her breest,—­some kind o’ an income, we’re thinkin’.”

By this time I saw the woman’s face; she was sitting on a sack filled with straw, her husband’s plaid round her, and his big-coat, with its large white metal buttons, over her feet.

I never saw a more unforgettable face,—­pale, serious, lonely, [Footnote:  It is not easy giving this look by one word:  it was expressive of her being so much of her life alone.] delicate, sweet, without being at all what we call fine.  She looked sixty, and had on a mutch, white as snow, with its black ribbon; her silvery, smooth hair setting off her dark-gray eyes,—­eyes such as one sees only twice or thrice in a lifetime, full of suffering, full also of the overcoming of it; her eyebrows [Footnote: 
                       “Black brows, they say,
      Become some women best; so that there be not
      Too much hair there, but in A semicircle
      or A half-Moon made with A Pen.”—­A WINTER’S tale.]
black and delicate, and her mouth firm, patient, and contented, which few mouths ever are.