the back stairs
we shouldn't be long."

"Father, people were looking at them. They--they were holding hands." He
forced himself to believe the lie. "You can't have her carrying on like
that with clients. It'll give the office a bad name."

At last his father raised his eyes, which, though bleared with age, were
still the windows of a sceptical soul, and let them fall. "Ellen is a
good girl, Philip," he said.

The young man began a gesture of despair, which he restrained lest those
inimical eyes should lift again. This was not a place, he well knew,
where sentimental values held good, where the part of a young and
unprotected girl would be taken against the son of the house out of any
mawkish feeling that youth or weakness of womanhood deserved especial
tenderness. It was the stronghold of his own views, its standards were
his own. And even here it was insisted that Ellen was a person of value.
There seemed nothing in the world that would give him any help in his
urgent need to despise her, to think of her as dirt, to throw on her the
onus of all the vileness that had happened to him. He broke out, "If
she's a good girl she ought to behave as such! You must speak to her,
father. There'll be a scandal in the town!"

Mr. Mactavish James seemed to have withdrawn his mind from the
discussion, for he had taken out his appointment diary, which could
surely have nothing to do with the case. But when Mr. Philip had turned
towards the door, the old man said, amiably enough, "Ay, I'll speak to
Nelly. I'll speak to her on Monday afternoon. The morning I must be up
at the Court of Session. But in the afternoon I'll give the girl a
word."

It was on the tip of Mr. Philip's tongue to cry, "Thank you, father,
thank you!" but he remembered that this was merely a matter of office
discipline that was being settled, and no personal concern of his. So he
said, "I think it would be wise, father," and went out of the room. He
ran upstairs whistling. It would be a great come-down for her that had
always been such a pet of his father's to be spoken to about her
conduct....

II

The door had swung ajar, so Mr. Mactavish James in his seat at his desk
was able to look into the further room and keep an eye on Ellen, who was
sitting with her back to him, supporting her bright head on her hand and
staring fixedly down at something on the table. Her appearance
entertained him, as it always did. He chuckled over the shapeless blue
overall,