geoise had given her
mother to understand that the interview need not long be continued. She
caught it, she thought, but it did not really help. There was still this
pressure of a flood of tears behind her eyes. She looked out of the
window and exclaimed, "It's getting dark!" She said it peevishly, as if
the sun's descent was the last piece of carelessness on the part of a
negligent universe. And as her eye explored the dusk and saw that the
bright spheres round the lamps were infested by wandering ghosts of
wind-blown humidity she thought of her walk home up the Mound and what
it would be like on this night of gusts and damp. "That puts the lid
on!" her heart said bitterly, and the first tears oozed. Somehow she
must go at once. She said thinly and quaveringly, "It's getting dark.
Surely it's time I was away home?"

There was a clock on the mantelpiece which told it was not yet half-past
four, but they both looked away from it. "Ay," said Mr. Mactavish James
cheerfully, "you must run away home. I'll not have it said I drive a
bairn to death with late hours. Good evening, lassie." He was so
terrified by the intensity of her emotion that he had given up playing
his fish. There stabbed a question through his heart. Had Isabella
Kingan suffered thus?

"Good evening, Mr. James," she said brightly, and went out into the
hall letting the door swing to, and pulled on her coat and
tam-o'-shanter in the darkness. Now that it did not matter if she cried,
she did not feel nearly so much like crying. "That's the way things
always are," she snorted, and began to hum the Marseillaise defiantly as
she buttoned up her coat. But though she was not seen here, she was not
alone. There pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace.
Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the
blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in
this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac
words. With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their
brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose,
that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting
strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she remembered the
bluish bloom that had been on his chin the first night she ever saw him.
At that she brought her clenched fist down on her other palm and sobbed
with hate. He had brought all this upon her.

And hearing that, Mr. M