she was going through a bad time like that now.

When at last he was free to continue his ride to Edinburgh he did not
greatly want to go. He would have turned back to Broxburn had he not
reflected that, although Ellen and her mother had not named any
particular day for his visit, they might perhaps expect him this
afternoon. Indeed, he became quite certain that they were expecting him.
But nothing seemed agreeable to him in his abandonment to this ritualist
desire to live soberly for a little so that he might share the sorrow of
the woman who was enduring pain because she had given him life. He
certainly would not make love to Ellen. He hoped that she was not so
wonderful as he had remembered her.

But though his spirit doubled on his track it did not lead him back to
solitude. Perhaps when the sun falls over the edge of polar-earth the
Arctic fox laments that he must run through the night alone, for in the
white livery he must assume at the year's death he feels himself beast
of a different kind from the brown mate with whom he sported all the
summer-time; and hears a soft pad on the snow and finds her running by
his side, white like himself. So it was with Yaverland when he came to
Hume Park Square, for the Ellen he found was a dove, a nun, a nurse. Up
to the moment she opened the door to him she had been a sturdy, rufous
thing, a terrier-tiger, exasperated because she had imperilled her
immortal soul by coming off her Princes Street pitch when a truly
conscientious woman would have gone on selling _Votes for Women_ for at
least five minutes longer; and because she had had to pretend to her
mother all through tea that she hadn't really expected him; and because
after her mother had gone out she had begun to read the _Scotsman's_
report of an anti-Suffrage meeting in London. "Yon Lord Curzon's an
impudent birkie," she said, with a rush of tears to her eyes that seemed
even to herself an excessive comment on Lord Curzon; then the knock
came. "It'll be my old boots back from the mending," she had told
herself bitterly, and went to the door like a shrew. And because there
had been some secret diplomacy between their souls of which they knew
nothing, some mutual promises that each would attempt to give what the
other felt was lacking in the universe at the moment, the first sight of
him made her change herself from top to toe to a quiet, kind thing.

The little sitting-room was drowsy as a church, its darkness not so mu