ch was the equivalent of the plain's monotony, did she
partake of its qualities. Her behaviour, too, was grand like the plain
and yet composed of material that, as stuff for grandeur, was almost as
uncompromising as mud.

She took the girl to the railings and made her look out to the sea,
saying, "It is rather fine in a queer way, isn't it? When I was a girl I
could run dryshod to the very end of the channel, and I daresay Richard
could still."

Ellen shivered. "Is it not terribly lonely out there, just under the
sky?"

"Oh, no, it's pleasant to be on innocent territory, with no human beings
living on it. There was a feeling, so far as I can remember it, of
extraordinary freedom and lightness." She spoke with a sincere cynicism,
an easy grimness that appeared quite dreadful to Ellen. The girl looked
appealingly at her, asking her not to give the sanction of her
impressive personality to such hopelessness about life, but had the ill
luck to catch her in the act of a practical demonstration of her dislike
for her fellow-creatures. Now that the train had puffed out of the
station the station-master, a silver-haired old man with a red face on
which amiability clung like a lather, had come to Marion's side and was
saying that he had not seen her for a long time, and asking how Richard
was and when he was coming back. Ellen thought this was very kind of
him, but Marion evidently found it tiresome, and hardly troubled to
conceal the fact, walking rather more quickly along the platform than
the old man could manage and giving no more answer to his questions than
a vague smiling "Hum." Ellen hoped that the poor old man was not
offended.

She found something dubious, too, about the lack of apology with which
Marion led her into the squalor outside the station, over the level
crossing, with its cobblestones veined with coal-dust, past the
fish-shop hung with the horrid bleeding frills of skate, and the
barber's shop that also sold journals, which stood with unreluctant
posters at the exact point where newspapers and flypapers meet; and up
the winding road, which sent a trail of square red villas with broken
prams standing in unplanted or unweeded gardens up the hill in the
direction of the church and the castle they had passed in the train. But
surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in
Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was
written "Hiemath," and there was something very ch