liking. As he walked up and down the street on its darker side he
could think upon the things that were happening behind the drawn blinds
and bolted shutters. It was as if he was the single tenant of a sleeping
star and guessing at the mysteries of a universe. Stories were happening
behind the walls, fires were glimmering, suppers were set, each family
for the time being was in a world of its own, split off from its
neighbours by the darkness.

A few shops lay open, throwing faint radiance on the footpath that swam
in water.

Miss Mary went to the window of two sisters who made caps on the Lady
Charlotte model and mantuas inspired by a visit to Edinburgh five years
ago. She scanned the contents of the window carefully.

"It's gone; I knew it would be gone," she said in a whisper to Gilian,
withdrawing hastily from the revelation of the window as a footstep
sounded a little way down the street.

He awaited her explanation, not greatly interested, for the blank
expanse of the moaning sea round the corner of a tall tenement filled
him with new and moving emotions.

"There has been a cap there for a week with lilac trimmings for Rixa's
sister, and now it has gone. It was there this morning, and I saw her
lassie going by with a bandbox in the middle of the day. That's two pair
at least for the Sheriff's party."

"Would it not be easier to-morrow to ask some one who were all there?"
said Gilian.

She shook his arm with startled affright.

"Ask! ask!" she exclaimed. "If you dared let on to any one we even heard
there was a party, I would--I would--be terribly vexed. No, Gilian, we
must hold our heads a bit higher than that."

She passed with the boy from tenement to tenement.

"Major Hall and his sister are there," she said, showing darkened
windows. "And the Camerons and the Frasers," she added later, informed
by the same signs of absence.

Out came the late merchants and shuttered their little windows and
bolted up their doors, then retreated to their homes behind. More dark
than ever became the world, though the rain had ceased. Only a few
windows shone wanly in the upper flats and garrets. The wind moaning in
the through-going closes expressed a sense of desolation.

And yet the town was not all asleep but for the Sheriff's party and
Miss Mary and the Paymaster's boy, for there came from the Abercrombie,
though the door was shut discreetly, a muffled sound of carousal. It
was not, this time, the old half-pa