ith that lewd look that old men
sometimes give to strong young men. He had perceived at once, from the
way Mr. James was sucking the occasion, that he had been sent for some
special purpose, and he did not believe, from the repetition of that
lewd look, that it related to his property in Rio or that it was clean.
He was prepared for the drawled comment, "I hear ye're making fren's wi'
our wee Nelly," and he was ready with a hard stare. It was enraging to
see that the old man had expected his haughtiness and that it was
evidently fuel for his lewd jest. "I am fond of wee Nelly. She's just a
world's wonder. You sit there saying nothing, maybe it doesn't interest
you, but you would feel as I do if you had seen her the way I did thon
day a year ago in June. Ay!" He threw his eyes up and exclaimed
succulently, "The wee bairn!" with an air of giving a handsome present.

Yaverland, who had not come much in contact with Scotch sentimentality,
felt very sick, and increasingly so as the old man told how he had met
her up at the Sheriff's Court. "Sixteen, and making her appearance in
the Sheriff's Court!" Yaverland had a vision of a court of obscure old
men all gloating impotently and imaginatively on Ellen's red and white.
"What was she doing there?" he asked in exasperation, forgetting his vow
to appear indifferent about Ellen, and was enraged to see Mr. Mactavish
James chuckle at the perceived implications of his interested enquiry.
"Well, it was this way. Her mither, who was Ellen Forbes, whom I knew
well when I was young, had the wee house in Hume Park Square. You'll
have been there? Hev' ye not? Imphm. I thought so. Well, they'd had
thought difficulty in paying the rent...." The story droned on
perpetually, breaking off into croonings of sensual pity; and Yaverland
sat listening to it with such rage, that, as he soon knew from the
narrator's waggish look, the vein in his forehead began to swell.

It appeared that the poor little draggled bird had in the summer of its
days been known as Ellen Forbes had got into arrears with the rent; as
some cheque had been greatly delayed, and that when the cheque had
arrived she had been taken away to the fever hospital with typhoid
fever, and that, since she had to lie on her back for three weeks,
Ellen, who was left alone in that wee house--he rolled his tongue round
the loneliness repellently--had neither sent the cheque on to her nor
asked her to write a cheque for the rent. The landlo