ive in the obvious
physical sense to have overcome the repulsion that her spirit and wit
must certainly have aroused in such a man as his father; and though he
suppressed his earliest memories of her because they introduced that
other who had shared his nursery, he had many pictures in his mind which
showed her brown and red-lipped and subtle with youth, and not the dark,
silent sledge-hammer of a woman that she had latterly become.

There came to him a memory of a distant winter afternoon, so far distant
that he could not have been more than four or five, when they had come
back from doing their Christmas shopping at Prittlebay, and he had
grizzled, as tired children do, at the steepness of the hill that
climbed from Roothing station to Yaverland's End, always a stiff pull,
and that day a brown muck of trodden snow. She had looked round with her
hard proud stare to make sure that nobody was watching them, and then
spread out her crimson cloak and danced backwards in front of him, and
cried out loving little gibes at his heavy footedness, her own vitality
flashing about her like lightning. When she was younger still, and had
not wept so much, she must often have glowed very beautifully under her
lover's eyes. It was a pity that she had chosen to love that thief, who
stole the memories of her glorious moments as he had stolen her good
repute and peace of mind, and crept away with the loot to the tomb on
the hillside where his son could not pursue him. As he thought of the
unmitigated quality of his mother's lot he hated other women for their
cheerful lives; and Ellen, who had felt that his mood had turned from
her, and was watching his face, said to herself: "He has some trouble
that he is not telling me. Well, why should he? We are almost
strangers." Suddenly she felt very weak and lonely, and put her hands
over her face.

Mrs. Lawson put her head round the door. "You young people's letting the
clock run on. Nae doot ye're douce and souple walkers, but if ye want to
catch the Edinburgh bus ye'll hev none too much time."

Yaverland and Ellen both started forward, and their eyes met. "Oh, we
must hurry!" she exclaimed, with a pale distress that puzzled him by its
intensity. Yet she made him wait while she pinned up her hair; and that
almost made him suspect her as a minx, for she looked so pretty with her
arms above her head and her white fingers shuttling in and out of her
red hair. But when they got into the lane outs