dreamingly, infatuated with the marvellous thing she had brought forth
that now was not. So greatly had the play declined in plot and character
since Mary's time that for the catastrophe of the present age there was
nothing better 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 Æneas 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