sing, and Ellen lifting to him a stubborn face that
warned him there would be a thousand resistances to overcome before she
would own herself a being accessible to passion. Yet this harsh
inexpertness about life was the essence that made these people
delightful to him. It was unreasonable, but it was true, that he adored
them because they were difficult.

"Ellen, run out and light the hall gas for Mr. Yaverland." And from the
courtesy in the tone and something gracious in Ellen's obedience he saw
that they were too poor to keep the gas burning in the hall all the
evening, and so the lighting of it ranked as a ceremonial for an
honoured guest. They were dear people.

As he buttoned his oilskins to the chin while Ellen stood ready to open
the front door he did not dare look at her because his stare would have
been so fixed and bright. He set his eyes instead on the engravings,
which for the most part represented Robert Burns as the Scotch like to
picture their national poet, with hair sleek and slightly waved like the
coat of a retriever hanging round a face oval and blank and sweet like a
tea-biscuit.

"You seem to admire Burns," he said.

"Me? No, indeed. Those are my grandmother's pictures. I think nothing of
the man. His intellectual content was miserably small."

"That's a proposition he never butted up against--"

"What?"

"A woman who said that his intellectual content was miserably small.
You're one of Time's revenges...."

She didn't follow his little joke, although she smiled faintly with
pleasure at being called a woman, because she was distressfully
wondering if her reluctance to let him go was a premonition of some
disaster that lurked for him outside. She so strangely wanted him to
stay. She could actually have wound her arms about him, which was a
queer enough thing to want to do, as if the feelers of some
nightmare-crawling horned beast were twitching for him in the darkness
beyond the door. This inordinate emotion must have some meaning, and it
could have none other than that Great Granny Macleod had really had
second sight, and she had inherited it; it was warning her that
something dreadful was going to happen to him on his way to the hotel.
"Well, if I see anything in the papers to-morrow morning about a big man
being run down by a motor-car in the fog, I'll know there's something in
the supernatural," said the cool elf that dwelt in her head. But agony
transfixed her like an arrow because he