lder of his blue nankin blouse; and long black eyes staring but
unshining. They were between the high blank walls of warehouses closed
for the night. They dared not run. Flippety-flop, flippety-flop, he came
after them, always keeping step. Leith Walk was a yellow glow a long way
off at the end of the street; it clarified into naphtha jets and roaring
salesmen and a crowd that slowly flocked up and down the roadway and was
channelled now and then by lumbering lighted cars; it became a
protecting jostle about them. Ellen turned and saw the Chinaman's flat
face creased with a grin. He had been savouring the women's terror under
his tongue, sucking unimaginable sweetness and refreshment from it. Mrs.
Melville was shedding angry tears and likening the Chinese to the
Irish--a people of whom she had a low opinion--(Mr. Melville had been an
Irishman)--but Ellen felt much sympathy as one might bestow upon some
disappointed ogre in a fairy tale for this exiled Boxer who had tried to
get a little homely pleasure. Ellen found it not altogether Grantown's
gain that it was wholly uninhabited by horror, being an honest row of
fishers' cottages set on a road beside the Firth to the west of Leith.
Its wonder was its pier, a granite road driving its rough blocks out
into the tumbling seas, the least urban thing in the world, that brought
to the mind's eye men's bare chests and muscle-knotted arms,
round-mouthed sea-chanteys, and great sound bodies caught to a wholesome
death in the vicinity of upturned keels and foundered rust-red sails and
the engulfing eternal sterilisation of the salt green waves.

From either of these places they sailed across the Firth: an arm of the
sea that could achieve anything from an end-of-the-world desolation,
when there was snow on the shores and the water rolled black shining
mountains, to a South Seasish bland and tidy presentation of white and
green islands enamelled on a blue channel under a smooth summer sky.
Most often, for it was the cheapest trip, they crossed to Aberlady,
where the tall trees stood at the sea's edge, and one could sit on
seaweedy rocks in the shadow of green leaves. Last time they had gone it
had been one of the "fairs," and men and women were dancing on the lawns
that lay here and there among the wooded knolls. Ellen had sat with her
feet in a pool and watched the dances over her shoulder. "Mummie," she
had said, "we belong to a nation which keeps all its lightness in its
feet," a