s so that they built up a well-proportioned
page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that
it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always
gave to one of the male clerks to copy. But that was all the work she
had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of
Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her. She was obliged to sit in
her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery,
which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting
any further or changing into anything else. Presently she went and knelt
in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the
side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic
lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding
bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a
lens of tears. She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the
client who had told on her. Surely she had as much right in Princes
Street as he had? And if it was too late for her to be there, then it
was too late for him also. "It's just a case of one law for the man and
another for the woman. Och, votes for women!" she cried savagely, and
flogged the window with the blindcord. Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve,
the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with
waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and
tee-heed that "a lawyer's office must be a dull place for a young leddy
like you!" Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for
his dealings with his wife's money....

But the peppered phrases would not come. One cannot do more than one
thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently.
"Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I
spent at Oban," she thought into her sodden handkerchief. "It was a
shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months
to pay for the trip. But life is like that...." Ah, what did they think
she had been doing with that man Yaverland? The shocked dipping
undertones of Mr. Philip's voice, the ashamed heat of his eyes, were
just the same as grown-up people used when they told mother why they had
had to turn the maid away, and that, so far as she could make out,
though they always spoke softly so that she could not hear, was because
the maid had let somebody kiss her. What was the use of having be