just like a bairn's, that she wore on her neat wee figure, and
the wild shining hair which resembled nothing so much as a tamarisk
hedge in a high wind, though she would have barked like a terrier at
anyone who suggested that it was not as neatly a done head as any in
Edinburgh. But he was very anxious about her. For some moments now she
had not moved, and this immobility was so unnatural in her that he knew
she must be somehow deeply hurt, as one who sees a bird quite still
knows that it is dead or dying. "Tuts, tuts," he sighed. "This must be
looked to. She is the bonniest lassie that I've ever seen. Excepting
Isabella Kingan." His right hand, which had been lying listlessly on the
desk before him, palm upwards, turned over when he thought of Isabella
Kingan. The fingers crooked, and it became an instrument of will, like
the hand of a young man.

But he was really quite old, nearly seventy, and well on the way to lose
the human obsession of the importance of humanity; so his attention
began to note, as if they were not less significant than Ellen's agony,
the motes that were dancing in the bar of pale autumn sunshine that lay
athwart the room. "It is a queer thing," his mind droned on, "that when
I came here when I was young I saw there was a peck of dust in every
room, and I blamed old Mr. Logan for keeping on yon dirty old wife of a
caretaker. I said to myself that when I was the master I would have it
like a new pin and put a decent buddy in the basement. And now Mr. Logan
is long dead, and the old wife is long dead, and I have had things my
own way these many years, but the place is still foul as a lum, and I
keep on yon slut of a Mrs. Powell. Ah well! Ah well!" He pondered, with
a Scotch sort of enjoyment, on the frustration of youth's hopes and the
progress of mortality in himself, until a movement of Ellen's bright
head, such a jerk as might have been caused by a silent sob, brought his
thoughts back to beauty and his small personal traffic with it.

"I do not know why she should mind me of Isabella Kingan. She is not
like her. Isabella was black as a wee crow. It is just that they're both
very bonny. I wonder what has happened to Isabella. She must be
sixty-five. I saw her once in Glasgow, in Sauchiehall Street, after she
was married, but she would not speak. Yet what else could I have done? I
had my way to make, and it was known up and down the length of Edinburgh
that her mother kept a sweetie shop in Leith