Hatter's Castle

"Will she die think ye, Doctor?"

"Who is she?" he said.

The old wife shook her head negatively.

"I dinna ken, ava', ava'. But what a bonnie, wee thing to suffer so much, Doctor." She seemed to entreat tm to do all he could.

"The baby?" he enquired.

"In the kitchen! 'Tis alive the now, but 'tis a puir, feeble bit bairn." The physician in him looked coldly, critically at the inert figure before him, but the man in him was touched. He seemed to trace, with his experienced eye, the record of all her sufferings, as though the history of these was indelibly delineated upon her features. He saw the pinched nostrils of the thin straight nose, the sunken rings of her dark eyes, and the piteous droop of the pale, soft lips. A feeling of compassion awoke in him, tinctured by a strange, flowing tenderness.

He took up again the frail, relaxed hand and held it in his as though to transfuse a current of life from his vital body into hers; then, as he turned the hand and saw the gash which transfixed the palm, he cried, in spite of himself,

"Poor child! She's so young and helpless." Then, ashamed of his weakness, he continued roughly, "She's in a bad way. Haemorrhage, bad hemorrhage, and shock.

Shock from God knows what misery. It's a case for the Cottage Hospital," he added finally.

At these words the young farmer, who had been silent in the background, spoke from the door:

"I'll have the horse in the shafts of the cart in a minute if ye like, Doctor."

Renwick looked at the old woman for confirmation. She nodded eagerly, her hands supplicating him.

"Very well, then!" He braced his shoulders. In this case he saw no chance of fee, only its difficulties and danger, and a hazard to his unformed reputation. But he was moved to take it. He felt he must take it. His dark eyes lit with a flashing desire to save her.

"It's not only the shock," he said aloud; "I don't like her breathing. Might be

pneumonia there, and if so " He shook his head significantly, turned and bent over his bag, and, extracting from it some temporary restoratives, applied these as best the circumstances permitted. When he had finished, the cart, a rough farm waggon as deep and heavy as a tumbrel, stood ready at the door. The infant was swaddled in blankets and placed carefully in one corner, then they lifted Mary up and placed her beside her child. Finally, Renwick clambered in and, while he supported Mary in his arms, the crofter jumped into his seat and whipped up the horse. Thus they set out into the night for the Cottage Hospital, the strange ambulance bumping and jolting slowly along, the doctor protecting the limp figure in his arms as best he could from the shocks of the rough road.

The old woman saw them disappear, then she sighed, turned, shut the byre door, and with bowed back went slowly into her house. As she entered the kitchen, the grandfather's clock in the corner chimed eight, solemn strokes. She went quietly to the chest of drawers, picked up her Bible and, slowly assuming her old steel spectacles, opened the book at random and began soberly to read.

XII

THE wind, which blew fiercely in the west, blew still more furiously in the east. On the Sunday afternoon when havoc ranged in Levenford and amongst the surrounding townships, still greater devastation roamed amongst the counties of the Eastern seaboard.

In Edinburgh, as Denis buffeted his way along Princes Street, the wind, tearing along the grey, weather-beaten thoroughfare, ballooned his coat about his ears and lifted him off his feet. He loved that wind; it made him feel strong to fight a passage against it. Hat in hand, his hair disordered, his lips parted, he cleaved his way along. The wind sang against his teeth like the song of a gigantic humming" top, and he sang too, or uttered spontaneous, inarticulate sounds, expressive of the virile exuberance that seethed within him. Of the few people in the street, most turned involuntarily to look at him, and muttered enviously, from blue, shivering lips, "My certies, he's a hardy chiel, that one!"

It was quarter to four. Denis had made an early tea at McKinley's "Family and Commercial Temperance Hotel." They did things well there no show, indeed, but a lavish abundance of good food and he had eaten his way through a large trencher of sausages and white pudding, cleared a plateful of oatcakes, and emptied the teapot in Ma McKinley's own private parlour. Old Mother McKinley would do anything for Denis just the way he had with her and with most people and he always went there when in Edinburgh. She had, in parting, given him a thick packet of sandwiches to sustain his body until his late arrival in Dundee and a large, smacking embrace to support his spirit until she saw him again. It was good to have friends like that, he thought warmly, as he felt the comforting wad of sandwiches buttoned against his side, whilst he strode out on his way to Granton, to take the ferryboat across the Firth of Forth for Burntisland. His only grievance against the weather was his fear that it might prevent them running the ferry, but if there was no boat, he was, he told himself facetiously, feeling vigorous enough to swim across the Firth.

Although it blew so hard, there was as yet no rain and, as it was only three miles to Granton, he disdained the usual conveyance to the ferry and decided to walk. It was fine to be alive! This wind intoxicated him; the feel of it upon his cheek made him want to live for ever. As he drove his feet hard upon the pavement, he knew he would cover the distance easily under the hour at his disposal.

His reflections, as he strode along, were pleasant. Business was opening out beyond his expectations and to-morrow, in Dundee, he hoped to consolidate his position with Blain and Company. Young Mr. Blain was the force in the firm; he liked him immensely and he felt that if he could convince him, persuade him to deal with Findlay's, the day would be won. He began to think out a smart, little speech to open his conversation on the morrow. He declaimed the address magnificently to the wind and to the empty streets as he walked along, enjoying himself immensely, emphasising his points by telling gesticulations, so that by the time Granton was reached he had riddled young Mr. Blain with epigrams, bombarded him with technicalities, and reduced him to impotence by solid argument.

Now, to his relief, he observed that the ferry bumped at her smari

pier with every indication of departure, and hastening his steps, he went on board the vessel. From the low deck of the boat the Firth looked darker and more threatening than from the jetty, with whitfe spume slapping over the crests of the slate-grey waves. The smtill boat rocked heavily and the rope hawsers attached from the vessel to the squat bollards on the quay creaked and thumped, as the combined strain of wind and tide pulled upon them. Denis, however, was an excellent sailor and, unperturbed, he joined three other passengers who were gathered in the bow of the boat, looking gloomily across the Firth, a disconsolate sense of danger binding them closer together.

"I don't like the look o' it," said one.

"Ay, it's gey and threatenin' like," said another.

"I'm beginning to wish I had taken the wife's advice and stayed at home ; " said the third, with a feeble attempt at jocularity. Denis rallied them.

"Do you think the captain would put out the boat if he wasn't sure of getting over?" he cried heartily. "It's only five miles across a mere nothing. Why, in twenty years we'll be jumping across a ditch like this, or walking over on stilts."

They looked at him doubtfully, but he laughed, joked, bantered them until they surrendered, and, in the space of five minutes, he had them enrolled under his banner. They accepted him as a leader; their fearful anticipation vanished; indeed, one of the group produced a small, flat bottle.

"Will we have a wee drappie before we start?" he asked, with a wink. It was the height of conviviality! The host partook first, then the two others sipped with the moderation of guests, but Denis refused.

"I'm so full of sausage, I'm afraid to chance it," he replied, with a gesture of broad pantomime towards the unruly water, indicating that his sole desire in life was to retain the excellent meal he had just paid for. They laughed delightedly; the fact that this reckless, intrepid youth might be as ridiculously ill as he suggested filled them with a returning sense of their own worth. And Denis encouraged them, adapting himself to the level of their society with verve and telling stories with such spirit that they did not fully observe the departure or the tossing in the Firth. One grew greenish and another swallowed queasily, but they would have died rather than disgrace themselves in the eyes of this young Hector now relating to them, in the climax of his fifth story, the brilliant repartee which the Irishman had made to the Englishman and the Scotsman, under circumstances of a particularly ludicrous and embarrassing character.

The few other passengers were less assured and remained huddled together as the boat pitched about like a cockleshell in the stormy water. They clung to the stanchions, lay upon the deck, or were openly sick, whilst the spray-laden wind howled through the rigging, and the fierce, snapping waves burst over the low bulwarks, covering the deck with a sheet of water which flooded from side to side with each roll of the ship.

But at length they drew near Burntisland, passed out of the stormy water and, after considerable manoeuvring, made fast. The skipper of the little vessel came of! the bridge, dripping in his oilskins.

"I'm not sorry to be in," Denis heard him say. "I didna like it. It's the worst crossing we've ever made."

The passengers disembarked hastily, although some had suffered so acutely that they were obliged to be carried off the ship on to the jetty, and here the small band of heroes bade Denis farewell.

"You're not going any further, then?" said Denis.

"Na! Na!" said the spokesman, looking up at the clouds. "We're all Burntisland lads, praise be, and it'll be a long time before we have another jaunt o' this nature to Edinburgh. Hame looks guid enough to me after that blatter o' sea."

They shook hands with him, solemnly, feeling that they would never forget him. "Man, he was a cure, yon fellow that cam' ower the Forth i' the storm," they would repeat to each other long afterwards. "He didna give a hang about anything."

When they had left him, Denis made his way to the station. The train for Dundee, being run in conjunction with the Granton ferry, and due to depart at 5.27 P.M., was already waiting, and as it was now twenty minutes past five, he walked along the platform, looking through the windows to secure an empty third-class compartment. A larger- number of people than might have been expected from the nature of the weather, were travelling, and he traversed the length of the train up to the engine without seeing a vacant carriage. At the engine, the guard stood talking to the driver and Denis, recognising in the former an acquaintance that he had made with his usual facility upon a previous journey, went up and accosted him.

"And how's Davie McBeath?" he cried. The guard turned his head, and, after a moment's hesitating scrutiny, his eye cleared.

"It's yourself, then, Mr. Foyle," he replied cordially. "I couldna place ye for a minute."

"Sure there's not another like me out of Donegal," grinned Denis.

"Do you get weather like this over there?" asked McBeath. "Mitchell," he indicated the driver, "and me are just discussing the gale; we're no so sure of the wind. It's in a bad quarter."

"Will it push the old, puffing billy backwards?" laughed Denis. Mitchell shook his head doubtfully.

"It's no' just exactly that," he exclaimed, and his look spoke more than his words; then, turning to his mate in the cab he asked:

"How is the gauge, John?"

The black face of the stoker looked up, his teeth showing whitely as he smiled.

"You've enough steam to take ye to Aberdeen!" he said. "Ay, and further than that, if ye like."

"Dundee'll be good enough for me, and for you too, Johnnie Marshall," replied the other dryly.

"Will she stand it, think ye?" enquired McBeath seriously, for the moment ignoring Denis.

"I canna say," replied Mitchell cryptically, "but we're shair tae find out, ay, and soon enough."

"What's all the mystery?" asked Denis, looking from one to the other.

The grinning face of the stoker looked up from the open door of the furnace, whilst the reflection of the flames played across his dusky, shining face.

"They're a' feared o' a wee bittie o' a brig," he guffawed, as he shovelled; "they dinna ken what steel and cement mean yet."

"Get awa' ye, man," growled Mitchell angrily. "Ye've twa mile o' it and that wind is blowin' richt at it ay and hammerin' like the picks o' ten thousand devils." At his words a hush seemed to fall on the group, then with a start McBeath looked at his watch.

"Well," he said, "whatever we think, the schedule says go, and go we must. Come away, Mr. Foyle."

"What exactly is the trouble?" asked Denis, as he walked up the platform with the guard. Davie McBeath glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, but he did not reply; instead, he changed the subject significantly, saying:

"That's a grand new ulster you've got."

"You like it."

"Ah! I do that! It's a real cosy thing for a night like this, and real smart too."

"Is it smart enough for a wedding, Da vie?" asked Denis, nudging the other confidentially.

"It is that!" replied the guard unthinkingly; then he looked up interestedly.

"What! What! Ye're not thinkin' o' " Denis nodded his head.

"I'm not thinking, man. I'm certain. Tuesday's the day, and like enough I'll wear this coat. Sure, it's part of my trousseau!"

McBeath gazed at the other quizzically, then his dry features relaxed, and they both laughed heartily.

"Weel! Weel! You don't say!" cried Da vie. "Man! You're a caution! Ye're moving ahead fast. For sure I wish ye the best o' everything to you and the wee lass, whoever she may be. She'll be braw, if I ken ye richtly. Come along, now. We canna put a bridegroom in with all these people in the thirds." He looked along his nose at Denis as he opened an empty first-class compartment. "It wouldn't be

safe."

"Thanks, Davie," said Foyle appreciatively. "You're a good sort. I'll send you a bit of the cake to sleep on." Then he added, more seriously, "See you later, at Dundee." The guard gave him a smile and a nod as he walked off, and a moment later the whistle blew, the flag waved, and the train moved out of the station.

Alone in his magnificence, Denis looked about him with satisfaction, and, leaning back upon the cushions, he raised his feet upon the opposite seat and fixed his eyes meditatively upon the ceiling. But slowly his gaze grew distant, and, piercing the low roof, reached far away. He was thinking of Mary.

He would, he reflected soberly, be married on Tuesday, not exactly in the manner he had hoped, nor in the fashion he had sometimes planned, but married none the less. The manner of the marriage did not matter, the fact remained that he would be no longer a bachelor, and already he began to feel older and more responsible.

A comforting glow pervaded him as he considered the nobility of his action in accepting, so willingly, this responsibility. He repulsed the thought that he had ever wished to repudiate the consequences of his love. "No," he cried aloud, "I'm not the sort of skunk to let down a girl like Mary." He became aware vividly of her trust, her loveliness, her faith in him, thought of her at first tenderly, then with a faint anxiety; thinking of the storm, he hoped, for her sake, that it had not touched Levenford. Here, despite the happy tenor of his mind, he began to feel unaccountably depressed; the subdued happiness which had succeeded his exuberance at the commencement of his journey now turned slowly to an unaccountable melancholy. He tried to shake this off, fixing his mind on the roseate future that awaited Mary and himself in their cottage at Garshake, envisaging the wonderful career he would carve for himself, thinking of the holidays, the trips abroad they would later enjoy but he could not dispel the shadow that had clouded his bright optimism. He began to be afraid for her and to ask himself if he had been wise to postpone taking her from her home until so late.

It began now to rain, and the windows of his compartment became blurred with a dismal covering of wet and slush. The pounding wind flung great gobs of sleet against the sides of the train with a sound like the slash of a wet cloth, whilst the rain hissed upon the roof of the carriage like fierce streams from the nozzle of a gigantic hose.

His depression deepened and his mind filled with a more mournful misgiving, as, with a sad regret, he visioned the sweet, mysterious beauty of her body and thought how he had deflowered that beauty.

At his violating touch a child had become a woman, who must have suffered bitterly by his act; her slender virginity had become bloated through him, and, in the effort of concealment alone, she must have endured misery; the intimate symmetry of her form appeared to him as something which he had destroyed, which she would never again regain. A sigh broke from him as, slowly, the train drew to a standstill at a wayside station. The train, which was not express, had already made several halts at intermediate stations without his having particularly observed them, but here, to his annoyance, the door of his compartment opened and an old countryman entered. He seated himself blandly in the opposite corner, steaming from the rain, whilst puddles of water ran off him on to the cushions and floor; emanating from him, and mingling with the steam, came the spirituous odour of a liquid more potent than rain-water. Denis stared at him, then remarked coldly, "This is a first-class compartment."

The old fellow took a large red-and-white spotted handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose like a trumpet.

" 'Deed it is," he said solemnly, affecting to look around the carriage. "I'm glad you told me. It's a rale pleasure for me to travel in style; but the first-class that ye speak o' doesna make muckle difference to me, for I havena got a ticket at all;" and he laughed uproariously, in a tipsy fashion.

Denis was so far below his normal humour that he failed to appreciate the situation. In the ordinary way he would have amused himself intensely with this unexpected travelling companion, but now he could only gaze at him glumly.

"Are you going far?" he finally asked.

"To Dundee bonnie Dundee. The town ye ken not the man. Na! Na! I'm not thinkin' o' the bonnets o' bonnie Dundee I mean the bonnie town o' Dundee," the other replied, and having thus explained himself with a grave and scrupulous exactitude, he added, meaningly, "I hadna time to get my ticket, though."

Denis sat up. He would, he realised, have to endure this for the rest of the journey and he resigned himself to it.

"What's the weather like now?" he asked. "You look wet!"

"Wet! I'm wet outside and inside. But the one counteracts the other, ye ken, and to a hardy shepherd like me wet clothes just means lettin' them dry on ye. But mind ye, it is a most awful, soughin 1 night, all the same, I'm glad I'm not out on the hills."

He nodded his head several times, took a small, foul stump of clay pipe from his pocket, lit it, covered it with its metal cap, and, inverting it from the corner of his mouth, sucked noisily; when he had filled the carriage with smoke, he spat copiously upon the floor without removing the pipe from his mouth.

Denis looked at the other with compassionate disgust, and as he tried to picture this gross, bibulous old yokel as a young man, wondered moodily if he himself might ever degenerate to such a crapulous old age, and his melancholy grew more profound. Unconscious of the effect he had produced, the old shepherd continued,

"Ay! It's good-bye to the hills for me. That sounds kind o' well, think ye no'? Ay! Good-bye to the hills. Man!" he laughed, slapping his thigh "It's like the name o' a sang. Good-bye to the Hills. Weel, onyway, I'm going back to my native town, and you'll never guess what for." He tittered vehemently, choking himself with smoke.

"You've come into some money, perhaps?" hazarded Denis.

" 'Deed, no! The bit of money I've got is what I've saved by hard and honest work. Try again." As Denis remained silent he went on garrulously.

"Ay! you'd never think it, but the plain truth is that I'm going " He paused to wink prodigiously, then blurted out, "I'm goin' to Dundee to get married." Observing with manifest enjoyment the effect he had produced, he meandered on

"I'm a hardy blade, although I'm not so souple as I was, and there's a fine, sonsie woman waiting for me. She was a great friend of my first wife. Ay! I'm to wed early the morn's mornin'. That's the way I'm takin' this train and breakin' the Sabbath. I maun be in time, ye ken."

As the other wandered on, Denis gazed at him with a curious repulsion, due, in the main, to the strange coincidence of his own circumstances. Here, then, was another bridegroom, linked to him in this narrow compartment by a bond of corresponding position. Did this disreputable veteran mirror the image of his contumely, or reflect to him a dolorous premonition of his future?

In dismay Denis asked himself if he were not as contemptible in the eyes of his own kind as this grey-beard was in his. A tide of self-depreciation and condemnation rushed over him as he began to review the manner of his life. An unusual humility startled him by the rapidity and force of its onset, and in this despair he remained, subdued and silent, until the train clattered into the station of St. Fort. Here his companion rose and got out of the compartment, remarking, as he did so. "We've a good way to go yet. I'll just get out and see if I canna get haud o' something to keep out the cauld. Just a wee dram to warm the inside o' the stammack." In a moment, however, he came back, to say reassuringly, "I'll be back! I'm not away, mind ye. I wouldna leave ye like that. I'll be back to keep ye company till we get to Dundee." Then he tramped off.

Dennis looked at his watch and saw that it was five minutes past seven. The train was up to time, yet, as he put his head out of the window, he found that the strength of the wind had increased beyond endurance. Passengers getting out of the open doors were bowled along the platform, and the heavy train, as it stood stationary, seemed to rock upon its wheels. Surrounding McBeath he saw a wind-beaten group clamouring:

"Is it safe for us to gang on, guard?"

"What a wind it is! Will the train stand it?"

"Will it keep on the line?"

"Lord save us, what a night this is! What about the bridge? Oh! I wish we were a' hame!"

He thought his friend the guard looked perturbed and irritable, but although McBeath did indeed feel anxious, with the charge of a hundred people upon his mind, he maintained in his replies the even and imperturbable calm of officialdom.

"Safe as the Bank of Scotland, Ma'am."

"Wind forsooth! Tuts, it's only a bit breezie, man. Think shame o' yourself."

"Ay, it'll haud the line and ye'll be hame wi' your lassock in an hour, ma fine wumman!" Denis heard him repeat placidly, composedly, impenetrably. His calmness seemed to reassure them completely, and at his comforting words the people scattered and entered their compartments.

At length the all clear was given and the train again began to move. As it did so Denis observed the figure of his travelling companion staggering against the wind in an effort to attain the rear-most carriage, but in his anxiety and haste, the old shepherd slipped and fell prostrate upon the platform. The train drew away from him, he was irrevocably left behind and, as they moved out of the station, Denis caught a last glimpse, under the gusty flicker of the station lamp, of the perplexed, discomfited face, filled with almost ludicrous desolation. As he sat in his corner, while the train approached the southern edge of the Tay Bridge, Denis reflected with a sombre humour that the other would assuredly be late for his nuptials in the morning. Perhaps it was a lesson meant for him. Yes, he must profit by this strange, unpleasant coincidence. He would not fail Mary on Tuesday!

The train moved on and, at thirteen minutes past seven, it reached the beginning of the bridge. At this point, before entering upon the single line of rails over the bridge, it slowed down opposite the signal cabin, to allow the baton to be passed. Without this exchange it was not permitted to proceed, and, still filled by a sense of misgiving, Denis again lowered his window and looked out, to observe that everything was correct. The force of the gale almost decapitated him but, in the red glare cast by the engine, he discerned, stretching dimly into the distance, the massive girders of the bridge, like the colossal skeleton of an enormous reptile, but of steel, strong and adamantine. Then, all at once, he saw the signalman descend the steps from his box with consummate care, clutching the rail tightly with one hand.

He surrendered the baton to the stoker, and, when he had accomplished this, he climbed back into his cabin with the utmost difficulty, fighting the wind and being assisted up the last few steps by the hand of a friend held out to him from within.

And now the train moved off again and entered the bridge. Denis raised his window and sank back in his seat composedly, but, as he was carried past the signal box, he received the fleeting impression of two pale, terrified faces looking at him from out of it, like ghostly countenances brushing past him in the blackness.

The violence of the gale was now unbounded. The wind hurled the rain against the sides of the train with the noise of a thousand anvils and the wet snow again came slobbering upoa the window panes, blotting out all vision. The train rocked upon the rails with a drunken, swaying oscillation, and although it proceeded slowly, cautiously, it seemed, from the fury and rush of the storm, to dash headlong upon its course. Thus, as it advanced, with the blackness, the noise of the wheels, the tearing rush of the wind, and the crashing of the waves upon the pier of the bridge below, there was developed the sensation of reckless, headlong acceleration.

As Denis sat alone in the silent, cabined space of his compartment, tossed this way and that by the jactation, he felt suddenly that the grinding wheels of the train spoke to him. As they raced upon the line he heard them rasp out, with a heavy, despairing refrain: "God help us! God help us! God help us!"

Amidst the blare of the storm this slow, melancholy dirge beat itself into Denis' brain. The certain sense of some terrible disaster began to oppress him. Strangely, he feared, not for himself, but for Mary. Frightful visions flashed through the dark field of his imagination. He saw her, in a white shroud, with sad, imploring eyes, with dank, streaming hair, with bleeding feet and hands. Fantastic shapes oppressed her which made her shrink into the obliterating darkness.

Again he saw her grimacing, simpering palely like a sorry statue of the Madonna and holding by the hand the weazened figure of a child. He shouted in horror. In a panic of distress he jumped to his feet. He desired to get to her. He wanted to open the door, to jump out of this confining box which enclosed him like a sepulchre. He would have given, instantly, everything he possessed to get out of the train. But he could not.

He was imprisoned in the train, which advanced inexorably, winding in its own glare like a dark, red serpent twisting sinuously forward. It had traversed one mile of the bridge and had now reached the middle span, where a mesh of steel girders formed a hollow tube through which it must pass. The train entered this tunnel. It entered slowly, fearfully, reluctantly, shuddering in every bolt and rivet of its frame as the hurricane assaulted and sought to destroy the greater resistance now offered to it. The wheels clanked with the ceaseless insistence of the tolling of a passing bell, still protesting, endlessly: "God help us! God help us! God help us!"

Then, abruptly, when the whole train lay enwrapped within the iron lamellae of the middle link of the bridge, the wind elevated itself with a culminating, exultant roar to the orgasm of its power and passion.

The bridge broke. Steel girders snapped like twigs, cement crumbled like sand, iron pillars bent like willow wands. The middle span melted like wax. Its wreckage clung around the tortured train, which gyrated madly for an instant in space. Immediately, a shattering rush of broken glass and wood descended upon Denis, cutting and bruising him with mangling violence. He felt the wrenching torsion of metal and the grating of falling masonry. The inexpressible desolation of a hundred human voices, united in a sudden, short anguished cry of

mingled agony and terror, fell upon his ears hideously, with the deathly fatality of a coronach. The walls of his compartment whirled about him and upon him, like a winding sheet, the floor rushed over his head. As he spun around, with a loud cry he too shouted, "God help us!" then, faintly, the name "Mary!"

Then the train with incredible speed, curving like a rocket, arched the darkness in a glittering parabola of light and plunged soundlessly into the black hell of water below, where, like a rocket, it was instantly extinguished forever obliterated! For the infinity of a second, as he hurtled through the air, Denis knew what had happened. He knew everything; then instantly he ceased to know. At the same instant as the first faint cry of his child ascended feebly in the byre at Levenford, his mutilated body hit the dark, raging water and lay dead, deep down upon the bed of the firth.

BOOK II

THE cutting cold of a March morning lay upon the High Street of Levenford. Large, dry snowflakes, floating as gently and softly as butterflies, insistently filled the air and lay deeply upon the frosted ground. The hard, delayed winter had been late of coming and was now tardy of passing, thought Brodie, as he stood in the doorway of his shop, looking up and down the quiet, empty street. Strangely, the quietness of the street consoled him, its emptiness gave him freer space to breathe. During the last three months it had been hard for him to face his fellow townsmen and the lack of stir about him came as a respite to his suffering, but unbroken pride. He could, for a moment, relax his inflexible front and admire his own indomitable will. Yes, his task had been difficult for the last three months but, by God, he had done it! The arrows they had launched at him had been many and had sunk deeply, but never by a word, never by a gesture had he betrayed the quivering of his wounded and outraged pride.

He had conquered. He pushed the square hat farther back upon his head, thrust his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, and, with his blunt nostrils doggedly sniffing the keen air, gazed aggressively down the silent thoroughfare. In spite of the biting cold he wore no overcoat or scarf; his intense satisfaction in the hardihood of his physique was such that he disdained this sign of weakness. What would I do with a coat, with MY constitution? was his contemptuous attitude, despite the fact that this morning he had been obliged to

break a thin skin of ice upon the cold water in his ewer before he could sluice himself. The frigid weather suited his disposition. He revelled in the iron frost, filled his chest invigoratingly with the chilled air, whilst the suction of his breath drew the white, sailing snowflakes on to his tongue, where they lay like melting hosts, filling him with a new refreshing force.

Suddenly he saw a man approaching. Only Brodie's stimulated pride kept him at his door, for he recognised the figure as that of the glibbest, smoothest gossip in the Borough. "Damn his sleekit tongue," he muttered, as he heard the slow, muffled steps approach and saw the other deliberately cross the roadway. "I would like to rive it from his mouth. Ay! he's comin' over. I thought he would."

Up came Grierson, wrapped to his blue ears. As Brodie had anticipated, he stopped.

"Good morning to you, Mr. Brodie," he began, stressing the "you" with a nicety of accent that might have been interpreted as deferential, or merely as ironic.

"Morning," said Brodie shortly. He had suffered acutely from the hidden venom of that tongue in the past and he distrusted it profoundly.

"The frost still holds firm, I fear," continued the other. "It's been a hard, hard winter, but, man, it doesna seem to affect you a bit. I believe you're made o' steel; you can thole anything."

"The weather suits me weel enough," growled Brodie, eyeing the other's blue nose contemptuously.

"The trouble is, though," replied Grierson smoothly, "that a' these hard frosts maun break some time. The ice has got to crack one day. There maun be a thaw, and the harder the frost the softer the thaw. There'll be a big change in the conditions here some day." He raised a guileless glance towards the other.

Brodie fully understood the double significance of the words, but he was not clever enough to reply in kind.

"Is that so?" he said heavily, with a sneer. "Man, you're clever, clever."

"Na, na, Mr. Brodie. It's juist fair intuition! What the Romans ca'ed takin' the omens frae the weather."

"Indeed! Ye're the scholar as weel, I see."

"Man!" went on Grierson, unperturbed, "this morning a wee robin redbreast flew into my house it was so perished like." He shook his head. "It must be awfu' weather for the birds and onybody that hasna got a home to go to." Then, before Brodie could speak he added, "How are all the family?"

Brodie forced himself to reply calmly, "Quite well, thank ye.

Nessie's gettin' on grandly at school, as no doubt ye've heard. She'll be runnin' awa' with all the prizes again this year." That's one for you, thought Brodie, with your big, stupid son that's always done out of first place by my clever lass.

"I hadna heard! But it's fine all the same." Grierson paused, then in a soft voice, remarked, "Have ye had ony word from the other daughter lately Mary, I mean?"

Brodie gritted his teeth, but he controlled himself and said slowly,

"I'll thank you not to mention that name again in my hearing."

Grierson manifested a great show of concern.

" 'Deed, I'm sorry if I've upset you, Mr. Brodie, but I had aye a bit regard for that lass o' yours. I was gey upset at her lang illness, but I had heard tell the other day that she had gotten a post away in London, and I was wonderin' if it was through these folks in Darroch the Foyles, I mean. Still, I've nae doubt ye ken as little as me."

He screwed up his eyes and glanced sideways at the other, as he continued:

"Ay, I took great notice o' the affair. In a human sort o' way, ye ken. I was real touched when the wee, bit bairn died in the hospital."

Brodie eyed him stonily, but the torture continued.

"They say it was a real bonny wean and the doctor was much upset when it slipped through his fingers. He took a great interest in the mother's case. I'm no' surprised either; it was so unusual, with the complications o' pneumonia and all." He shook his head mournfully.

"Man! What a calamity, though, that the father wasna' spared to make an honest woman o' ahem, ahem! Forgive me, Mr. Brodie! I clean forgot! I was just lettin' my silly tongue run away wi' me."

Grierson was abjectly apologetic. He had rubbed Brodie on the raw, made him wince, and was clever enough to know when to withdraw.

Brodie looked right through the other. Inwardly he writhed, but in a low, strained Toice he said,

"Let your mealy-mouthed tongue run on like the Wellhall burn; it makes no odds to me."

It was a mistaken attitude, for it immediately offered an opportunity to renew the baiting which Grierson was not slow to seize.

He laughed, with a soft, unctuous titter.

"That's richt, that's richt! That's the spirit that never flinches! I can't but admire ye, Mr. Brodie," he went on, "at the firm stand ye've taken amongst the disgrace o' it all. A man that had such an important standin' in the Borough might easily have been broken richt to bits by such a comedown, for there's no doubt that for months the whole town has been ringin' wi' it."

"The gabble of the Cross is of no moment to me," retorted Brodie, with a heaving breast. He could have killed the other with his glance, but he could, with dignity, use no other weapons, and his pride forbade him to retreat.

"Ay, ay," replied Grierson speculatively, "but it might shake up another man to be the butt o' a' these dirty divots, and the laughin' stock o' the place. Man!" he added, in a low tone, almost as an afterthought, "it would be enough to drive an ordinary man to the drink for consolation."

Brodie lowered at him from beneath his bushy eyebrows. Had they been calumniating him on that score, too? "Nothing like a wee droppie to cheer up a man, especially in this weather," drawled Grierson, in an insinuating tone.

"Well, I maun be off. It's cold work standin' bletherin'. Good day to you, Mr. Brodie." Grierson passed quickly out of range with meek, bowed head, without giving the other time to reply. Although he shivered from his stand in the freezing air, inwardly he warmed himself at a fire of delicious self-appreciation. He glowed at the thought of the quiver in Brodie's fierce eye as his delicately pointed barbs had sunk home, and feasted his recollection on the great, heaving sigh that the cumulation of their poison had finally produced. He

chuckled at the richness of the jest to relate at the club this evening; they would laugh till they burst at the story as he would tell it. He tee-heed to himself in anticipation. And why shouldn't he have lowered the stuck-up runt? What did he think he was, with his insolent, haughty airs? Besides, what man would have turned his own child out, like a dog, on such a night? It had been the death of the bairn. Ay, he had nearly killed Mary by it too, if reports were to be believed! Pneumonia, and child-birth fever, and God only knows what she

had suffered. It was scandalous, yes, even if she was a precious. He went on and out of sight, still hugging his reflection closely.

Brodie watched him down the road, his lips drawn into a thin, crooked line. That was the way of them, he thought. They would try to stone him, to kick him, to batter him to bits now that he was down. But, at the very idea, he drew himself up proudly. He was not down! Let them that suggested it wait and see. The whole, damnable business would have blown over, would be only dimly remembered, in another month or two. His real friends, the gentry, the big people of the district, must feel for him only sympathy and regret. But, at the memory of what he had endured, his tense lips quivered slightly.

All those weeks whilst Mary had lain between life and death at the Cottage Hospital, he had stood with the hard, craggy indifference of a rock, immovable in his determination to outcast his daughter. By her own act she had outlawed herself and he had proclaimed openly that he would let her rot beyond the bounds of decent society. Under the wordless wilting of his wife, under the loud-tongued gossip and hotly fluctuating opinion of the town, under the pressure of a biting, private interview with Doctor Ren wick, under the contumely of public affronts and reproaches, he had remained immutable and unyielding. He had not looked near her and the consideration of his inflexible resolution now soothed his ruffled spirit. But they did not know what he had suffered; the blow to his pride had been almost mortal. With a grim relief he diverted his thoughts to the solace which had comforted him through these bitter months, and he allowed his mind to dwell gloatingly upon the Tay Bridge disaster! He did not consider with any satisfaction the death of the bastard infant he had from the first disowned it but the thought of Foyle's broken body the pitiful remains of which had been recovered and now lay putrif ying in Darroch soil had rarely been out of his thoughts. It was the salve for his wounded arrogance. His imagination had riotously indulged itself amongst a host of vivid, morbid details. He did not care that a hundred others had perished; the loss of the entire train was but the instrument of a just vengeance. This one man had wronged him, had dared to oppose him, and now he was dead. It was a sweet consolation!

He was turning to go into his shop when he was again accosted. A little man, with all the restless timidity of a rabbit, had bolted out from next door to speak to him. It was Dron. Contempt marked Brodie's drawn features as he gazed at the jerky agitation of the other, and his self-assurance, restored always by an appreciation of the terror he could inspire in others, returned, whilst he surmised disdainfully the object of the little man's visit. Would he be going to tell him about the arrival of his brat? he wondered, as he noted the peculiar, suppressed look that marked him.

Dron's aspect was certainly remarkable, as, trembling with a repressed excitement, rubbing his hands rapidly together with a rustling sound, his pale eyelashes blinking ceaselessly, his legs shaking as though with tetanus, he essayed, stammeringly, to speak.

"Out with it, then," sneered Brodie, "and don't keep me on my own doorstep any longer. What species o' animal is it ye've been blessed wi' this time?"

"It's no exactly that," said Dron hurriedly, with a fresh spasm of fidgets. Then he added slowly, like one who has rehearsed it carefully, "I was just wonderin' if you were quite sure you didna want these premises o' mine I offered you last back end." He jerked his head in the direction of the empty shop. "You may have forgotten that you threw me out on the pavement that day, but I ha vena! I ha vena forgotten that ye flung me out on the broad o' my back." His voice rose in a shrill crescendo at the last words.

"Ye fell down, my little mannie, that was all. If ye chose to sit on your backside outside my place o' business I canna blame ye; but if it's no' as pleasant a position as ye might find, then talk to your wife about it. It's no affair o' mine," said Brodie calmly. Yet the other's eye fascinated him, pervaded as it was by two antagonistic emotions warring for supremacy, filled by such a look as might occupy the half- terrified, half-exultant eye of a rabbit that views an enemy caught in its own snare.

"I was askin' ye if ye were sure," Dron palpitated, without heeding the interruption; then he hurried on:

"I say are ye quite sure ye dinna want these premises o' mine? Because if ye did want the shop, ye canna have it. I ha vena let it! I ha vena let it! I've sold it! I've sold it to the Mungo Hat and Hosiery Company." He shouted out the last words in triumph, then he rushed on. "I've gotten more than my price for they have unlimited capital. They're going to fit up a grand, big emporium with everything, and a special window and a special department for hats and caps. I knew ye would like to hear the news, so I couldna wait. The minute I had signed the contract I came round." His voice rose gloatingly, almost to hysteria. "Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you gurly, big bully!" he yelled. "Smoke it till it sickens ye. That'll learn ye to mishandle folks weaker than yoursel'." Then, as if in fear that Brodie would attack him, he whirled around and scuttled off to his burrow.

Brodie stood perfectly still. Dron's pusillanimous ebullition disturbed him not at all, but his news was catastrophic. Would misfortune never desert him? The Mungo Company, originating in and at first confined solely to Glasgow, had for some time past been reaching out tentacles into the adjacent countryside; like pioneers, realising the advantage of the principle of multiple shops, they had invaded most of the townships in Lanarkshire and now they were stretching slowly

down the Clyde. This incursion, Brodie knew, had meant disaster for many a local shopkeeper; for not only did the Company indulge in such flashing pyrotechnics as bargain sales and glittering window displays, wherein their articles were marked, not in plain honest shillings, but in deceptive figures ending cunningly in iiV^d., and were actually adorned by trumpery cards which tempted the fancy seductively under such terms as, "The Thing for the Bairns", or "Real Value", or even "Exquisite", but they cut prices ruthlessly in the face of competition. They were in Darroch and Ardfillan, that he knew, but, although they were not exclusively hatters, he had often flattered himself into thinking that they would leave Levenford alone because of his old-established, deeply rooted business. He had told himself disdainfully that they wouldn't sell a hat a year. And now they were coming! He was aware that it would be a fight, and he would make it a bitter fight, in which he would let them try what they could do to James Brodie, then take the consequences. A sudden realisation took him of the proximity they would occupy to him and a bitter surge of black resentment made him shake a menacing fist at the empty shop as he turned and went into his own.

To Perry, meekly ubiquitous as always, he threw out: "What are ye glumping at there, you dough-faced sheep? Do some work for a change. That empty look of yours fair scunners me."

"What would you like me to do, sir? I'm not serving."

"I can see you're not serving. Do you mean to infer that I have no customers, me that's got the best and most solid business in the town. It's the snow that's keeping folks away, you fool. Clear up the place a bit, or take a bar of soap and go out and wash your feet," shouted Brodie, as he banged into his office.

He sat down. Now that he was alone and his bold front to the world slightly lowered, the almost imperceptible change in him became faintly discernible in the tincture of hollowness which touched the smooth, firm line of his cheek, in the tenuous line of bitterness that ran downwards from the angle of his mouth. On his desk the Herald lay unopened he had not looked at a paper for months, an omission supremely significant and now, with a gesture of negligent distaste, he slashed it off his desk and on to the floor with a fierce swap of his open palm. Immediately his hand sought his pocket, and he drew out, with familiar unconsciousness, his pipe and tobacco pouch, looked at them suddenly as if he wondered how they had come into his hands, then laid them on the desk before him, with a grimace of aversion. He did not wish to smoke on this morning which had been so consistently miserable for him. Although there was a bright coal fire in the room, despite his vaunted indifference to the inclemency of the weather, he suddenly felt chilly: whilst a shiver ran through him he reflected on what Grierson had said. "There's nothing to keep out the cold, or cheer a man up, like a wee droppie." A wee droppie! What an expression for a grown man to use, thought Brodie; but it was like Grierson to talk like that, with his soft, pussy voice and his creeping, sneaking ways. The obvious construction of the remark which rose to his mind was that, at the Cross, they had him a drunkard already, he who hadn't touched drink for months.

He jerked out of his seat impatiently and looked through the frosted window at the snow which was everywhere, on the ground, on the frozen Leven, on the house tops, in the air, falling relentlessly, as though it would never cease to fall. The drifting flakes appeared to Brodie each like an oppression in itself supportable, but becoming insufferable by weight of numbers. As he cogitated, a dormant molecule of thought began to swell within his mind. He felt in his dull brain the blind injustice of the veiled accusation that he had been consoling himself with drink. "That's it," he muttered. "I'm gettin' the blame and none of the comfort." The desolation of the scene again struck frigidly upon him. He shivered once more and continued to talk to himself. This propensity of articulate self-communion was entirely new, but now, as he spoke thus, the process of his ideas became more lucid and less entangled. "They say I'm takin' a dram, do they; it's the sort of thing the measly swine would say, without rhyme nor reason; but, by God! I will take them at their word. It's what I'm needin' anyway, to take the taste o' that braxy out o' my mouth the poor, knock-kneed cratur' that he is, wi' his 'wee droppies.' Him and his sleekit 'beg your pardons' and 'by your leaves', and his scrapin' and bowin' down in the dirt. Some day I'll kick him and keep him down in it. Ay, I maun have something to clean my mouth after this mornin's wark." His face grimaced dourly as he added ironically, still addressing the empty room, "But thank you all the same, Mister Grierson thank you for your verra acceptable suggestion."

Then his features changed; suddenly he experienced a wild and reckless desire to drink. His body felt strong, so brutally powerful chat he wanted to crush iron bars, so eagerly alive, with such vast potentiality for enjoyment, that he felt he could empty huge reservoirs of liquor. "What good does it do me to live like a blasted stickit minister they talk about me just the same. I'll give them something to babble about, blast them!" he cried, as he pulled his hat down over

his eyes and strode darkly out of the shop.

A few doors off stood a small, quiet inn, "The Winton Arms", owned by an elderly, respectable matron named Phemie Douglas, famed for her liquor, her virtue, and her snug sitting room known as "Phemie's wee back parlour" to the choicer spirits amongst the better class of the townspeople, for whom it was a favourite resort.

Brodie, however, on entering the tavern, avoided this social centre, as he now had no time for words; he wanted to drink, and the longer he waited the more he desired it. He entered the public bar, which was empty, and demanded from the barmaid a large whisky toddy.

"Hurry up and bring it," he said, in a voice dry from the violence of his craving. Now that he had ordained that he would drink, nothing could stop him, nothing arrest the swelling urge which made his throat dry, caused his hands to clench and unclench restlessly, made his feet stamp chafingly upon the sawdust floor of the bar whilst he awaited the hot whisky. When she brought it, he drank the scalding liquid in one, long breath.

"Another," he said impatiently.

Altogether he had four, large whiskies, hot and potent as flame, which he consumed as rapidly as he obtained them, and which now worked within him like the activation of some fiery ferment. As he glowed, he began to feel lighter; the shadows of the last three months were lifting; they still swirled like smoke clouds about his brain, but nevertheless they lifted. A sardonic leer played about his mouth as a sense of his superiority and of his invulnerable personality impressed him, but this was the sole expression of the thoughts which rushed within him. His body remained quiet, his actions grew cautious, more restrained; he remained absolutely within himself, whilst his bruised pride healed itself in the roseate thoughts which coursed swiftly through his mind. The barmaid was young, attractive, and quite desirous of being talked to by this strange, huge man, but Brodie ignored her, did not even observe her, as, wrapped in the splendid emancipation from his hateful despondency and engrossed in the incoherent but dazzling consideration of his future plans and triumphs, he remained silent, staring blankly in front of him. Finally he asked for a bottle of whisky, paid for it, and went out.

Back in his office he continued to drink. His brain clarified with each glass, grew more dominant, more compelling; his body responded more quickly and more perfectly to his movements; he now sanctioned with an intense approval all his recent actions.

The empty bottle stood on the table before him, bearing on the label the words: "Mountain Dew", which struck his bemused fancy as notably appropriate; for now he felt as powerful as a mountain and as sparkling as dew.

"Yes," he muttered, addressing himself to the bottle, "you mark my words; they can't down me. I'm more than a match for them. I can master them. Everything I did was right. I wouldna draw back a step o' the road I took wi' her. Just you wait and see how I'll go ahead now. Everything will be forgotten and nothing will stop me! I'll get the whip hand o' them."

Actually he did not know whom he was indicting, but he included largely and indeterminately in that category all whom he imagined had opposed him, slighted him, or failed to recognise him as the man he was. He did not now think of the threatened opposition to his business, which became, in the swollen magnitude of his disdainful pride, too petty, too ridiculously ineffectual to affect him adversely.

The opposition which he recognised was universal, intangible, yet crystallised in the feeling that any man's hand might be raised against his sacrosanct dignity; and now this obsession, always latent within him, strengthened and become more corrosive in his mind. And yet conversely, whilst the danger to his position loomed the more largely before him, his faith in his ability to conquer such a menace was augmented and exalted in such a manner as to render him almost omnipotent.

At last he started, took out his watch and looked at it. The hands, which appeared larger and blacker than usual, showed ten minutes to one.

"Time for dinner," he told himself agreeably. "Time to see that braw, tidy wife o' mine. It's a grand thing for a man to have such a bonnie wife to draw him hame." He got up impressively, but with a slight, almost imperceptible sway, and walking solidly out of his office, disregarding the awestruck, cringing Perry absolutely. He stalked through the shop and into the street, gained the middle of the street, and held it like a lord. Along the crown of the causeway he swaggered, head erect, shoulders thrown back, planting his feet in front of him with a magnificent sense of his own importance. The few people who were abroad gazed at him in amazement, and as, from the corner of his eye, he saw them glance, their astonishment fed his vanity, his intoxicated assurance battened on their wonder. "Take a good look," his attitude seemed to say. "It's Brodie you're lookin' at James Brodie, and, by God, he's a man!" He walked through the snow the whole way home as though he headed a triumphal procession, keeping so exactly in the centre of the road, and holding so undeviatingly to his course that such traffic as traversed the streets had perforce to go around him, leaving him the undisputed king of the causeway.

Outside his house he paused. The white envelope of snow vested it with an unreal and delusive dignity, softening the harsh lines, relieving the squat and rigid contours, blending the incongruous elements with its clinging touch so that, before his fuddled eyes, it reared itself in massive grandeur, looming against the opaque, slate-coloured sky with an illusion of infinite dimensions. He had never liked it so well or admired it so much and a sense of elation that he should possess it held him as he marched to the front door and entered his home.

In the hall he removed his hat and, with wide extravagant gestures, scattered in all directions the thick snow that had caked upon it, amusedly watching the mushy gobbets go slushing against the roof, the walls, the pictures, the chandelier; then, wildly, he stamped his heavy boots upon the floor, dislodging hard, pressed lumps of ice and snow. It would give that handless slut of his something to do to clean up his mess, he thought, as he walked into the kitchen with the air of a conqueror.

Immediately, he sat down and delved into the huge steaming bowl of broth, sweet with the essence of beef and bones, and stiff with the agglutination of barley, that stood on the table anticipating his arrival, the ignored reminder of his wife's devotion and forethought. Just the thing for a cold day, he thought, as he supped greedily with the zest of a ravenous animal, lifting huge, heaped spoonfuls rapidly to his mouth and working his jaws incessantly. The meat and small fragments of bone that floated through the pottage he rent and crushed between his hard teeth, revelling in the fact that for weeks his appetite had not been so keen or the taste of food so satisfying upon his tongue.

"That was grand," he admitted to Mrs. Brodie, smacking his lips coarsely at her, "and a good thing for you. If ye had singed my broth on a day like this I would have flung it about your lugs." Then, as she paused at the unusual praise, he bellowed at her, "What are ye gawkin' at; is this all I've to get for my dinner?"

At once she retreated, but, as she hastily brought in the boiled beef and platter of potatoes and cabbage, she wondered fearfully what had drawn him from out his perpetual, grim taciturnity to this roaring, devilish humour. He hacked off a lump of the fat beef and thrust it upon his plate; he then loaded it with potatoes and cabbage, and began to eat; with his mouth full, he regarded her derisively.

"My, but you are the fine figure of a woman, my dear," he sneered, between champing mouthf uls. "You're about as straight as that lovely nose o* yours. No, don't run away." He raised his knife, with a broad, minatory gesture, to arrest her movement, whilst he finished masticating a chunk of beef. Then he went on, with a fine show of concern, "I must admit ye ha vena got bonnier lately; all this worry has raddled ye; in fact, you're more like an old cab horse than ever now. I see you are still wearin' that dish clout of a wrapper." He picked his teeth reflectively with a prong of his fork. "It suits you right well."

Mamma stood there like a wilted reed, unable to sustain his derisive stare, keeping her eyes directed out of the window, as though this abstracted gaze enabled her better to endure his taunts. Her face was grey with an ill, vitreous translucency, her eyelids retracted with a dull, fixed despondency; her thin, work-ugly hands played nervously with a loose tape at her waist.

Suddenly a thought struck Brodie. He looked at the clock. "Where's Nessie?" he shouted.

"I gave her some lunch to school, to save her coming back in the snow."

He grunted. "And my Mother," he demanded.

"She wouldna get up to-day for fear of the cold," she whispered. A guffaw shook him. "That's the spirit you should have had, you fushionless creature. If ye'd had that kind o' gumption ye would have stood up better, and no' run down so quick." Then, after a pause, he continued, "So it's just you and me together. That's very touchin', is't not? Well! I've grand news for ye! A rich surprise!"

Immediately her look left the window; she gazed at him with a numb expectation.

"Don't excite yourself, though," he scoffed, "it's not about your fine, bawdy daughter. You'll never know where she is! It's business this time. You're always such a help and encouragement to a man that I must tell ye this." He paused importantly. "The Mungo Clothing Company have taken the shop next door to your husband ay next door to Brodie the Hatter." He laughed uproariously. "So maybe ye'll find yourself in the poorhouse soon!" He howled at his own humour.

Mrs. Brodie restored her gaze into space. She suddenly felt weak and sat down; but as she did so his mocking eye darkened, his face, already flushed with hot food, flamed sullenly.

"Did I tell ye to sit down, ye limmer! Stand up till I've done with ye."

Like an obedient child, she rose.

"Maybe the fact that these blasted swine are goin' to have the audacity to settle on my doorstep doesna mean much to you. You get your meat and drink too easy perhaps, while I've got to work for it. Does your weak mind not see it's going to be a fight to a finish to their finish?" He banged his fist on the table. His ranting gaiety was wearing off and giving place, instead, to a morose reactionary temper. "If ye canna think ye can serve. Go and get my pudding."

She brought him some steamed apple dumpling and he began to attack it wolfishly, whilst she stood like some bedraggled flunkey at the other end of the table. The news he had given her caused her little concern. In the shadow of Brodie's dominant personality she did not fear pecuniary disaster; although he kept her household allowance parsimoniously tight, she understood, always, that money was free with him, and often she had seen him draw out from his pocket a shining handful of golden sovereigns. Her dejected spirit was grappling with another care. She had not received a lettr from Matthew for six weeks, and, before that, his communications to her had been growing steadily briefer, and so irregular as to cause her the deepest vexation and misgiving. Mary she had now abandoned as

irrevocably lost to her; she did not even know her whereabouts, except that it had been rumoured that the Foyles had found her a situation of some sort in London, but of what nature she did not know; now it was Matthew upon whom she built her entire hopes and affection. Nessie was so absolutely Brodie's exclusive favourite that only Matt was now left to Mamma. But, apart from this, she had, indeed, always loved him best and, now that he was neglecting to write to her, she imagined that ill health or misfortune had surely befallen him. Suddenly she started.

"Give me some sugar. What are you moping and moonin' about?" Brodie was shouting at her. "This dumplin' tastes like sorrel. You've got as much hand for a dumplin' as my foot." The more the effect of the liquor left him the more surly he became. He snatched the sugar basin from her, sweetened the pudding to his liking, then consumed it with every indication of dissatisfaction.

Finally he rose, shaking himself in an effort to dispel the heavy lethargy which was beginning to affect him. Going to the door he turned to his wife and said cuttingly, "Ye'll get sitting down now! I've no doubt the moment my back's turned you'll be crouching at the fire wi' your trashy books, while I'm away working for you. Don't tell me you're not lazy; don't tell me you're not a slut. If I say so, then ye are and that's the end o't. I know ye for what you are you lazy besom." In his own increasing ill-temper he sought sullenly for some new means of wounding her and, as an idea of a parting shot of extreme subtlety struck him, his eyes gleamed maliciously, with the humour of using Dron's news of this morning, speciously, as a pretext for her discomfiture.

"Now that we've got opposition in the business," he continued slowly, pausing at the door, "we must economise. There'll have to be less wastin' and throwin' out in this house, and for a start I've made up my mind to cut down your allowance for the house. Yell get ten shillings a week less from now on and don't forget I want no savin' on my food. Ye maun just cut out what ye waste and give me the same as usual. Do ye hear me. Ten shillings a week less for ye! Think over that when ye're at your novelettes." Then he turned and left the room.

II

WHEN her husband had gone Mrs. Brodie did, indeed, sit down, feeling that if, by his departure, she had not been permitted to rest her tired body, she would have fallen at his feet upon the floor from sheer weariness and from a gnawing pain within her side. This pain was peculiar, like a slow, harassing stitch which, though she was so inured to it as almost to ignore it, continually dragged upon her strength and rendered her, when she remained standing for any length of time, unduly and incomprehensibly fatigued. But, as she sat there, it was apparent from her features, which had aged considerably in the last three months and which now bore the look of remote concentration, that she was not occupied by the consideration of her own physical disabilities, but was influenced by a deeper and more moving cause for sorrow.

Brodie's last threat had not yet greatly affected her; she was, at the moment, too crushed to realise its portent and, although she vaguely understood that his conduct had been unusual and his manner exceptional, she had no suspicion of the cause. Nor was she greatly perturbed at his abuse. On this especial side of her nature she was so calloused to the lash of his tongue that she now hardly noticed a variation in the mode of her chastisement, and against any of his sneering charges it never occurred to her to attempt to defend herself; she could not have uttered the mildest or most logical assertion in her favour contrary to his will. Long ago she had realised, with a crushing finality, that she was chained to a man of domineering injustice, that her sole defence would be to develop a supine indifference to every irrational imputation with which he vilified her. She had not entirely succeeded and he had broken her, but she had at least evolved the faculty of inhibiting him from her meditation in his absence from the home. Therefore, the moment he went out, she directed her thoughts away from him and automatically they returned to the object of her recent solicitude her son.

At first, Matt's letters had reached her with a satisfying and affectionate regularity, and with these initial letters he had every month sent her the sum of five pounds to invest for him in the Levenford Building Society. She had loved the tone of these early letters; they had been to her so engrossingly interesting, of such an elevated sentiment, and so filled with strongly expressed moral rectitude. Then, gradually, a slow transition had occurred, and his letters, though still appearing regularly with each mail, had dwindled in volume and altered in principle, so that, though she had devoured the few husks of scanty and frequently disturbing news within them, her maternal craving had not been satisfied; nor had the half-hearted, stereotyped expression of regard, with which they had iavariably concluded, stifled her vague misgivings. When he had thus cut down his epistles to the shortest and most meagre limits, she had begun to write to him reprovingly, but alas, ineffectually, and his acknowledgment of her first letter in this spirit had been to ignore it completely and to miss the mail for the first time since he had left her. His omissions subsequently had grown more frequent, more disturbing, and now she had not heard from him for nearly six weeks.

Agnes Moir had suffered in the same respect and- his later letters to her had been indifferent in sentiment to the point of actual coldness, filled with veiled, then direct allusions, to the unsuitability of the Indian climate for a wife, and interpolated by intimations as to his unworthiness or unwillingness to accept her chastely proffered matrimonial relationship. Miss Moir's soft, amorous nature had received a rude and painful check by these chilling and infrequent effusions. Now, as she thought of Agnes, Mamma, with the irrational

yet inherent notion of seeking consolation in a despondency equal to her own, decided, despite her own lassitude and the inclemency of the weather, to visit her future daughter-in-law. A glance at the clock told her that she had two free hours which she could utilise for this purpose without being missed by any of the household an important point as, since Mary's banishment, Brodie expected her to account to him for her every absence from the house.

Accordingly, she got up and, ascending to her room, discarded her wrapper by allowing it to slide from her to the floor; without once regarding herself in the glass she made her toilet by giving her face a quick wipe with the wetted end of a towel. She next withdrew from the wardrobe what revealed itself to be, after removing several pinned, protecting sheets of paper, an old sealskin jacket. The jacket, a relic of the days before her marriage, was now worn, frayed, shiny, and in places of a drab, brownish tinge. It had been kept and worn intermittently for a period of over twenty years, and this decayed and dilapidated coat, which had once enclosed her young, virgin figure, held as much tragedy as Margaret Brodie herself. She did not, however, view it in this sombre light, regarding it as sealskin, real sealskin, no longer perhaps elegant in cut, but still genuine sealskin, and treasuring it accordingly as the most splendid garment she possessed. For a moment she forgot her sorrow as, holding up the jacket, denuded of its wrappings, to the satisfaction of her appraising eyes, she shook it gently, touched the faded fur with caressing fingers; then, with a sigh, as though she had shaken out from its musty texture faded recollections of her forgotten youth, slowly she assumed it, when at least it had the merit of covering her rusty gown and sheathing warmly her decrepit figure. Her next action was to cram upon her untidy hair, and to stab carelessly into position, a black hat plumed with a withered pinion which trailed, with a frightful travesty of coquetry, behind her left ear; having thus accomplished completely her attire for the outer air, she hastened downstairs and left the house with a mien which was almost stealthy.

In the street, unlike her husband, she did not swagger her way down the middle of the road, but instead crept along the inner side of the pavement with short, shuffling steps, her head inclined, her face blue with cold, her figure shirking observation, her entire aspect a graphic exposition of resigned martyrdom. The snow turned her dull sealskin to glittering ermine, blew into her eyes and mouth and made her cough, penetrated her thin, inadequate boots and soaked her feet so profusely that, long before she reached the Moir's shop, they squelched at every step.

Despite the unexpectedness of this visitation, Agnes was delighted to see her and welcomed her warmly, whilst a quick look passed between the two women, each searching the other's eyes for some recorded sign of better tidings. Immediately they knew their eager hope to be unfulfilled, deferred, and their eyes fell dejectedly; but still they voiced the question which each had, silently, already answered.

"Have you had anything this week, Aggie?"

"Not yet, Mamma." She fondly addressed Mrs. Brodie by that term in the sanguine anticipation of her future relationship. "Have you?"

"No, dear, not yet, but maybe the mail is delayed by the bad weather," said Mrs. Brodie, in a despondent tone.

"I shouldn't be surprised," replied Agnes forlornly.

Actually each attempted to delude the other, for they knew by heart the arrival of the posts from India, and the mystery of the passage of mail ships was now to them an open book; but to-day, under the intolerable burden of their growing uncertainty, this feeble effort of deception was useless and they now gazed at each other blankly, for a moment, as if they had already exhausted their entire range of conversation. Agnes, by virtue of her position- as hostess, recovered first, and collecting her forces said, considerately:

"You'll have a cup of tea with me, Mamma. You're all wet and cold from the snow."

Mrs. Brodie assented dumbly and followed her into the little back shop where, amidst a profusion of empty biscuit tins, sweet bottles, and wooden chocolate boxes, a small iron stove threw out a meagre heat.

"Sit down there, Mamma," continued Agnes, opening the metal window of the stove and placing a chair before this small glowing mouth. "The weather's keeping us as quiet as can be, so I'll have time for a crack with you."

By mutual consent an armistice was tacitly proclaimed for the cessation of their unhappy exchanges, and, whilst Agnes boiled the kettle, Mamma steamed her damp boots at the fire and agreed meditatively:

"Ay! 'Twas snowin' heavy again as I came along. It's good to see a blink of heat on a day like this."

At these words Agnes threw a small shovelful of coke on to the red embers and enquired:

"Will you have tea or cocoa, Mamma? I've got some fresh Epps' in this week."

"I think I would prefer the cocoa. It's more sustaining, and nourishing like, than tea, on a cold day. That's one thing about you, Agnes, you always offer a body something tasty."

"I can surely do that for you, Mamma," replied Miss Moir, pursing her lips significantly. "It would be a pity if I couldn't put myself about a bit for you. Will ye not take your coat off?" and she made an advance to assist in the removal of the sealskin.

"No! No! Thanks," cried Mamma hastily, with a drearful consciousness of her deficiencies underneath. "I'll not be biding that long." But her eyes watered gratefully as she took the cup of hot cocoa and sipped it appreciatively; she even accepted and nibbled a sweet biscuit; then, as comfort stole through her, she sighed:

"It's been a hard winter for me. I don't know how I've come through it."

"I well know that, Mamma! You have suffered."

"Ay, I've suffered! I never thought I could have endured such disgrace, Agnes. I didn't merit it. And I think her father blames me for not having watched Mary better." She could hardly bring herself to articulate her daughter's name, it had been so firmly proscribed from her lips.

"Nobody could be blamed for her fall but herself, Mamma. Your influence could only have been for good wickedness is in the person that sins. You'll just need to let me take her place."

"That's good o' yc, Agnes, but there's times at night I can't get her out of my head. I never thought I should miss her so much she was always that quiet and douce about the house and I don't even know where she is."

"You must forget her now," insisted Agnes gently.

"Her father wouldna let me speir a word about her. Not even when she was near dyin' in the hospital. Not even when the puir bairn died."

Agnes drew her mouth together.

"I'm not sure if I should tell you, Mamma' she began slowly, "and it's not a pleasant subject for me it's not the thing for a nice girl to be connected with, even indirectly but I heard the other day that she was in London." She gave to the name of the city an accent of imputation and opprobrium which seemed to summarise her opinion of its manifold potentialities for wickedness.

"Do ye know what she's doing?" cried Mamma.

Agnes veiled her eyes and shook her head.

"I can't be sure," she replied, lowering her voice, "but I've been told only been told, mind you that it's service."

"A servant!" gasped Mamma. "Oh, dearie me! what a thing to come to! It's terrible! What would her father say if he knew! A Brodie a servant!"

"What else is she fitted for?" replied Agnes, with a faint toss of her head. "We should be thankful it's an honest occupation, if indeed it is so."

Despite the bond between Mrs. Brodie and herself it gave her a pleasurable sense of moral and social superiority to impart this news, which she had avidly sought amongst the tittle-tattle of the town.

"A servant in London!" repeated Mamma faintly. "It's awfu'. Could these folks in Darroch no' have done something for her?"

"Indeed, that's the very point," cried Agnes. "These Foyles wanted the child for the sake of the son's memory, so as to take it back to Ireland with them they've gone back there, ye know. Ye can't believe all ye hear; of course, there's all sorts of stories about, but I believe the truth is that, when it died, they took a spite at her and got rid of her the quickest they could!"

Mrs. Brodie shook her head negatively.

"That wouldna be difficult," she retorted. "Mary was always an independent girl; she would take charity from nobody no, she would work for her living first."

"Well, anyway, Mamma, I didn't like telling you, but I thought it best you should know. Anyway, your responsibility for her is ended. Mind you, although she has lowered the name of my intended, I bear no grudge against her. I hope she may in time repent; but you have got others to think of."

"Ay, that's true, Agnes! I maun swallow the bitter pill; but I will say this I never thought much of Mary, never valued her until I lost her. Still I maun forget, if I can, and think of them that's left to us." She sighed heavily. "What's come over our poor Matt at all, at all? It fair breaks my heart not to have news o' him. Can he be ill, think ye?" They were now embarked upon the consideration of the subject vital to them both and, after a moment's thought, Miss Moir shook her head dubiously.

"He's said nothing about his health," she replied. "He's been off his work once or twice, I know, but I don't think it was from sickness."

"Maybe he wouldn't like to frighten us," said Mrs. Brodie diffidently, "There's agues and fevers and jaundice and all kinds of awfu' troubles out in these foreign parts. He might even have got sunstroke, although it's strange to think of such a thing with all this snow about us here. Matt was never a strong boy." Then she added inconsequently. "He aye had a weak chest in the winter, and bronchitis, that needed thick garments."

"But, Mamma," cried Agnes impatiently, "he would never get bronchitis in a hot country. They would never get snow like this in Calcutta."

"I ken that, Agnes," replied Mrs. Brodie firmly, "but a weakness like that might work inwardly in a hot country, and forebye if he opened his pores he might sit doun and get a chill, as easy as look at ye."

Agnes did not seem to take kindly to this train of thought and she arrested it by a pause, after which she said slowly:

"I've been wondering, Mamma, if some of these black persons have not been exerting an evil influence over Matt. There's people called Rajahs rich heathen princes that I've read awful things about, and Matt might be led away. He might be easily led," she added solemnly recollecting, perhaps, her own enticement of the receptive youth.

Mrs. Brodie instantly had visions of all the potentates of India luring her son from grace with jewels, but indignantly she repudiated the sudden, baleful thought.

"How can ye say that, Agnes?" she cried. "He kept the best of company in Levenford. You should know that! He was never the one for bad companions or low company."

But Agnes who, for a Christian woman, had an intensive knowledge of her subject, which must necessarily have come to her through the marvellous intuition of love, continued relentlessly:

"Then, Mamma, I hardly like to let the words cross my lips, but they have wicked, wicked attractions out there like dancing girls that that charm snakes and dance without " Miss Moir, with downcast eyes, broke off significantly and blushed, whilst the down on her upper lip quivered modestly.

Mrs. Brodie gazed at her with eyes as horrified as if they beheld a nest of those snakes which Agnes so glibly described; demoralised by the appalling suddenness of a suggestion which had never before entered her mind, she wildly visualised one of these shameless houris abandoning the charming of reptiles to charm away the virtue of her son.

"Matt's no' a boy like that!" she gasped.

Miss Moir compressed her lips delicately and bridled, then raised her heavy eyebrows with an air of one who could have revealed to Mrs. Brodie secrets regarding the profundities of Matthew's passionate nature which had hitherto been undreamed of. As she sipped her cocoa her attitude seemed to say, "You ought to know by now the propensities of your children. Only my inviolate and virtuous maidenhood has kept your son pure."

"Ye've no proof, have ye, Agnes?" wailed Mrs. Brodie, her apprehension strengthened by the other's strange air.

"I have no definite proof, of course, but I can put two and two together," replied Miss Moir coldly. "If you can read between the lines of these last letters of his, he's always at that club of his, and playing billiard matches, and out at night with other men, and smoking like a furnace." Then, after a moment's silence, she added petulantly:

"He should never have been allowed to smoke. It was a step in the wrong direction. I never liked the idea of these cigars; it was downright fast!"

Mrs. Brodie wilted visibly at the obvious insinuation that she had countenanced her son's first step on the road to ruin.

"But, Aggie," she blurted out, "you let him smoke an' all, for I mind well he persuaded me by saying ye thought it manly."

"You're his mother. I only said it to please the boy. You know I would do anything for him," retorted Agnes, with a sniff which verged almost into a sob.

"And I would do everything for him too," replied Mrs. Brodie hopelessly; "but I don't know what's going to come of it all."

"I've been seriously wondering," pursued Agnes, "if you ought not to get Mr. Brodie to write a strong letter to Matt, sort of, well, reminding him of his duties and obligations to those at home. I think it's high time something was done about it."

"Oh! That wouldna do at all," cried Mamma hastily. "It would never do. I could never approach him. It's not in me, and besides it's not the kind of thing his father would do." She trembled at an idea so antagonistic to her invariable line of conduct towards Brodie, so contrary to her usual concealment of everything that might provoke that imperial wrath, and she shook her head sadly, as she added, "We maun do what we can ourselves, for his father wouldna stir his finger

to help him. It may be unnatural, but it's his style. He thinks he's done a' he should do."

Agnes looked grieved. "I know Matt was always afraid always respected his father's word," she said, "and I'm sure you don't want any more discredit on the family."

"No, Agnes, I don't like to contradict you to your face, but I'm certain you're not on the right track. I would never believe wrong of my boy. You're anxious, like me, and it's put you on the wrong idea. Wait a bit and you'll have a grand, big budget of good news next week."

"It can't come quick enough for me," replied Miss Moir, in a frigid tone which coldly indicated her grievance against Mrs. Brodie in particular, and her growing resentment, fed by the recollection of Mary's recent disgrace, against the name of Brodie in general. Her breast heaved and she was about to utter a bitter, contumacious reproach when suddenly the shop door bell went "ping", and she was obliged, with heightening colour, to rise servilely to answer the call and to serve a small boy with an inconsiderable quantity of confectionery. This supremely undignified interruption did nothing towards restoring her equanimity but, instead, activated her to a lively irritation and, as the penetrating voice of her client demanding a halfpennyworth of black-striped balls clearly penetrated the air, the obstinate perversity of her temper deepened.

Unconscious of the working of this angry ferment in Miss Moir's exuberant bosom, Mrs. Brodie, in her absence, sat huddled in her chair before the stove, her thin chin sunk in the scraggy wetness of the sealskin coat. Surrounded externally by struggling currents of steamy vapour, there struggled also, within her mind, a dreadful uncertainty as to whether she might not be responsible for some vague and undetermined weakness in Matt, through a fault in his upbringing. A frequent expression of Brodie's a decade ago flashed into her mind, and she now saw vividly, in her anguish, her husband's contemptuous face as, discovering her in some fresh indulgence towards Matthew, he snapped at her, "You're spoiling that namby- pamby brat of yours. You'll make a braw man o' him!" She had, indeed always attempted to shield Matt from his father, to protect him from the harshness of life, to give him extra luxuries and privileges not accorded to her other children. He had never had the courage to play truant from the Academy, but when he had desired, as he frequently did, a day off or had been for some reason afraid to attend school, it was to her that he had come, limping and whining,

"Mamma, I'm sick. I've got a pain in ma belly." Whenever he had feigned illness, of whatever kind, he had affected always that limping, hobbling, lame-dog gait, as though the agony arising in any organ of his body flew immediately to one leg, paralysing it and rendering him incapable of locomotion. She had seen through him, of course, but though undeceived by his pretences, a wave of her foolish maternal love would rush over her and she would compliantly answer, "Away up to your room then, son, and I’ll fetch ye up something nice. Ye've got a friend in yer mother, anyway, Matt." Her stultified affections were obliged to find an outlet and she had lavished them upon her son, feeling the imperative need, in that harsh household, of binding him to her by bonds of love. Had she spoiled his manhood by her indulgence? Softened her son into a weakling by lax, tolerant fondness? Immediately her mind formulated the idea, her heart indignantly repudiated it, telling her that she had shown him nothing but kindness, gentleness and lenience, had wished for him nothing but what was good; she had slaved for him too, washed, darned, knitted for him, brushed his boots, made his bed, cooked the most appetising meals for him.

"Ay," she muttered to herself, "I've served that laddie hand and foot. Surely he can never forget me? I've taken the very bite out my mouth for him."

All the toil she had expended upon her son, from the washing of his first napkins to the final packing of his trunk for India, rose up before her, and she was confronted with a sense of bewildering futility of all her love and service in the face of his present treatment of her. She blindly asked herself if it were her incompetence alone which had rendered her enormous and unremitting efforts useless, so that he now used her so indifferently and left her in such harassing suspense.

Here, a sudden sound startled her, and she looked up wanly, to observe that Agnes had returned and was addressing her in an uneven tone of ill-repressed vindictiveness.

"Mamma," she cried, "I'm going to marry Matt. I'm going to be his wife and I want to know what's going to be done about this. You've got to do something at once."

Mamma regarded her humbly, with the mild, moist blue eyes that shone meekly from under the grotesque, bedraggled black hat.

"Don't start on me, Agnes dear," she said submissively. "I've had enough to stand in my time without having a hard word from you. I'm not fit to answer ye back, ye can surely see," and she added feebly, "I'm just a done woman."

"That's all very well," cried Agnes in a huff, "but I'm not going to have Matt taken away like this. He belongs to me as much as any one. I'm not going to give him up."

"Aggie," replied Mamma, in a dead voice, "we don't know anything; we can't tell what's happening; but we can pray. Yes! That's what we can do. I think I would like us to put up a prayer in this very room. Maybe the Almighty, the same Lord God that looks down on Matt in India, will look down on us two anxious women here and show us a light to comfort us."

Agnes, touched on her weakest side, was mollified, and the stiffness of her figure relaxed, the glitter faded from her eye as she said,

"Maybe you're right, Mamma. It would be a comfort." Then, more as a polite formality than anything else, she asked, "Will you speak, then, or will I?"

"You do it better than me," said Mrs. Brodie unassumingly. "You put up a word for us both."

"Very well, Mamma," replied Agnes complacently.

They knelt down in the small, stuffy room, amongst the jumbled clutter on the floor of bottles, boxes, tins, surrounded by the untidy litter of straw packing and sawdust, their altar a packing case, their ikon a framed advertisement upon the wall. Still, they prayed.

Agnes, kneeling straight and upright, her thick, short body tense with an almost masculine vitality, and potent with the pressure of her restraint, began to pray in a loud, firm voice. Amongst the godly people in the church movements with which she was identified Miss Moir was noted for the power and richness of her spontaneous prayer, and now the words flowed from her lips in an eloquent stream, like the outpourings of a young and fervent priest supplicating for the

sins of mankind. Yet she did not petition, she seemed indeed to demand, and her dark eyes glowed, her full bosom heaved with the intensity of her appeal. All the fire of her nature entered that passionate prayer. Her words were proper, modest, stereotyped, but in essence it was as though she throbbingly implored the Almighty not to cheat her of the man she had captivated and subdued by the meagre charms with which He had endowed her. No one had ever looked at her but Matt, she knew her attractions to be limited, and, if he failed her, she might never marry. All the suppressed feeling dammed within her had been restrained within bounds only by visions of the ioyous promise of the future and she now tacitly implored the Almighty not to defraud her of the fulsome fruition of these desires in the state of holy matrimony.

Mamma, on the contrary, seemed to sink down in a supine mass, like a heap of discarded, draggled clothing; her head sagged with a pleading humility; the faint, speedwell blue of her pathetic eyes was washed with tears; her nose flowed with lacrymation. As the loud, fervent words fell upon her ears, the image rf her son rose before her and, while at first she applied her handkerchief furtively, soon she used it profusely, and at length she wept openly. All the time, her heart seemed to beat out the words, "Oh! God! If I did wrong over Mary, don't punish me too much. Don't take Matt away from me. Leave me, still, my son to love me."

When the prayer was ended there was a long pause, then Agnes rose, extended her hand to Mamma and helped her to her feet; facing each other closely, amicably, the two women now regarded each other with a glow of understanding and sympathy. Mamma nodded her head gently, as if to say, "That'll do it, Agnes. It was wonderful."

New life seemed to have possessed them both. This outpoured confession of all their hopes, fears and desires to the unknown heavens towards a Supreme, Omniscient and Omnipotent Being left them assured, comforted, and fortified. Now they were positive that all would be well with Matthew and, as Mamma at length turned to go, invigorated and refreshed, a look passed between them expressive of their sweet, secret cooperation and they kissed each other a sanguine affectionate good-bye.

III

TOWARDS the middle of March, the empty shop next door to Brodie's became the nucleus of a seething activity. Previously, when, in its unoccupied wretchedness, it had been to him a perpetual eyesore against the refinement of his establishment, he had viewed it with contemptuous disgust; but immediately after Dron's communication that it had been sold, he began to see it with a different, a peculiar and more intense disfavour. Every time he passed in or out of his own quarters he darted a furtive, antagonistic glance at the vacant, dilapidated premises, quickly, as if he feared to have that glance intercepted, yet vindictively, as though he vented his spleen upon the inanimate building. Its two empty windows were no longer vacuous, but became to him hateful, and each morning as he came along, fearing, yet hoping, that signs of the incoming of the new company would be evident, and still the same shabby, void aspect met his gaze, he experienced a compelling desire to hurl a heavy stone with all his force, to shiver the blank and glass panes. As day followed day for an entire

week, and still nothing happened, this deferred action angered him he had been so strung up for battle and he began to ponder obtusely if the whole idea was not simply a spiteful invention of Dron's, concocted in order to irritate him. For the space of one full day he felt convinced that the shop had not been sold and, during that time, he scoffed openly, with a flaunting triumph, but immediately, a short announcement in the Levenford Advertiser, stating briefly that the Mungo Company would open a new branch at Number 62 High Street at the beginning of the month of April, and that the fullest details would be given in the following week's issue, destroyed this transitory illusion; the conflict, occurring solely in Brodie's own perverted mind, between himself and the inert building reopened more bitterly than before.

Shortly after this pretentious announcement in the Advertiser, a dapper, urbane visitor had come into Brodie's shop and, with an agreeable yet deprecatory smile, presented his card in introduction.

"Mr. Brodie, I am, as you see, the district manager of the Mungo Hat and Hosiery Company. I want us to be friends," he said, holding out his hand affably.

Brodie was dumbfounded, but beyond ignoring the proffered hand, he gave no indication of his feelings and made no departure from his usual manner.

"Is that all ye want?" he asked abruptly.

"I understand your very natural feelings," the other began again. "You already consider us your enemies. That is really not strictly so. Although we are, in a sense, business opponents, we have found by experience that it is often mutually advantageous for two establishments of the same nature such as yours and ours to be together."

"Do ye tell me, now," said Brodie ironically, as the other paused impressively, and, not knowing his man or the symptoms of his gathering wrath, expansively continued.

"Yes, that is so, Mr. Brodie. We find that such a combination attracts more people to that particular centre, more shopping is done there, and this, of course, is advantageous to both shops. We multiply the trade and divide the profits! That's our arithmetic," he concluded, as he imagined rather neatly.

Brodie looked at him icily.

"You're talkin' a lot of damned lies," he said roughly. "Don't think ye can pull the wool over my eyes like that, and don't refer to my business in the same breath as your own gimcrack huckster's trade. You've come here to try and poach on my preserves and I'm goin' to treat you like a low poacher."

The other smiled. "You surely can't mean that! I represent a reputable firm; we have branches everywhere, we are not poachers. I am going to open the new branch myself and I want to be with you. And you," he added flatteringly, "well you certainly don't look like a man who could fail to understand the value of cooperation."

"Don't talk to me about your blasted cooperation," cried Brodie, "if that's the name ye give to stealing other folks' custom."

"I hope you don't mean us to infer that you have the exclusive rights to monopolise the hat trade here," said the other, with some indignation.

"I don't care about the right, I have the might, and I tell ye I'll smash you!" He flexed up his great biceps with a significant gesture. "Ill smash you to bits."

"That surely is a childish attitude, Mr. Brodie! Cooperation is better than competition every time. Of course, if you choose to fight," he waved his hand deprecatingly, "we have large resources. We have had to cut our prices before, in similar circumstances, and we can easily do it again."

Brodie threw a glance contemptuously at the pasteboard of the visiting card which lay crushed in his hand.

“Man! Mr. whatever your name is you talk like a penny novelette. I don't intend to reduce my prices one farthing," he drawled pityingly. "I have the connection here, that's all, and I'm just man enough to keep it."

"I see," the other had replied succinctly; "you are definitely going out of your way to demand open hostility."

"By God!" Brodie thundered at him. "That's the only true word you've spoken yet an' I hope it's the last thing ye will say."

At these final and unmistakable words the other had turned and walked quietly out of the shop; then, upon the following day the fifteenth of March a small corps of workmen had descended upon the place next door.

They were working now, irritating him intensely by the sound of their labour, by each tap of their hammers which beat with exasperating monotony into his brain. Even in the intervals of silence he was harassed by their presence, kept anticipating the onset of the staccato tattoo, and, when it recommenced, a pulse within him throbbed dangerously in the same tapping rhythm. When the rending of saws on wood came through the dividing wall he winced, as if the saw had rasped his own bones, and at the cold steely sound of the chisels upon stone he frowned, as if they carved upon his brow, above and between his eyes, a deep, vertical furrow of hatred.

They were gutting the shop. The men worked quickly and in the rush to complete their operations as rapidly as possible, worked also overtime; double wages apparently meant nothing to the Mungo Company! At the end of a week they had cleared out the old window frames, the doorway, the dilapidated shelves and counter, the whole worn wreckage of a bygone age, and now the denuded frontage leered at Brodie like a mask, its window spaces the sightless sockets of cyjs and its empty doorway the gaping, toothless mouth. Then the plasterers and decorators added their efforts to those of the joiners and masons, altering visibly, from day to day, by their combined exertions and skill, the entire aspect of the structure. Brodie hated every phase of its change and he encompassed within his growing aversion for the transformed building these workmen who, through their labours, were reconstructing it so admirably and making it the finest and most modern shop in the Borough. On an occasion when one of these had entered Brodie's establishment and, touching his cap, asked civilly if he might be obliged with a bucket of water to make tea for himself and his mates next door, as their own supply had been temporarily suspended at the main, Brodie had shot the astonished man out of his shop-

"Water!" he had snarled. "Ye want water, and ye have the impertinence to come here for your favours. Ye'll get none of it. If the whole gang o' ye were fryin' in Hell I wouldna so much as put a drop on one o' your tongues. Get out!"

But this animadversion had no effect upon their activities, serving only, or so it seemed to him, to stimulate these, and moodily he observed thick, scintillating plate-glass windows of a green translucency come into place, rich show cases appear like mushrooms in the space of a night, an ornately lettered signboard emerge glittering! Finally, under his eyes, in broad daylight the crowding anathema a nodel of a huge top hat, sumptuously and opulently gilt, was erected above the doorway, where it swung jauntily from its supporting pole with every breath of air. Brodie's demeanour to the town during this period gave, in general, no marked indication of the emotions which he repressed. He manifested outwardly only calm indifference, for his very pride forbade him to speak; and to his acquaintances who rallied him on the matter of the encroachment he exhibited an air of profound contempt towards the new company, met Grierson's gall- dipped witticisms at the Philosophical Club with the assumption of a careless and superior unconcern.

The general opinion was that Brodie would undoubtedly carry the day against the invaders.

"I give them six months," remarked Provost Gordon judiciously, to the select junta of the club one evening, in Brodie's absence, "before Brodie drives them out. He's an unco' deevelish man that, for an enemy. Dod, he's quite capable o' layin' a charge o' gunpowder under their braw new shop."

" 'T would be a risky job wi' that sparky temper o' his," inserted Grierson.

"He'll spark them out," replied the Provost. "He fair beats me, does James Brodie. I know of no man alive who would have come through a' that awf u' pother and disgrace about his daughter without turnin' a hair, or once hangin' his heid. He's a black deevil when his purpose is set."

"I'm not so sure, Provost; na, na, I'm not just so sure," drawled the other, "that the very deliberateness o' him michtna thwart its ain purpose, for he's that obstinate he would try to outface a mule. Forbye, Provost, he's gotten so big for his shoes now that folks aye, even the county folks who liket it at first are beginnin' to get a wheen sick o' it. That grand style o' his is juist like the lordly salmon; a wee bittie is all right, but if ye get it served up a' the time, man, ye get awfu' scunnered by it."

Seeing himself thus the object of their speculation and sensing its slightly favourable tone, Brodie began to feel that the public eye was turned encouragingly towards him as a defender of the old, solid order of the Borough against the invasion of the trumpery new, and he became, in his appearance, even more of the dandy, ordered two new suits of the finest and most expensive cloth, bought himself in the jeweller's at the Cross a smart, opal tie-pin which he now wore in place of his plain, gold horseshoe. This pin was immediately the object of criticism amongst the cronies and was passed from hand to hand in admiration.

" 'Tis a bonnie stone although I'm no judge," tittered Gricrson. "I hope it hasna ruined you to buy it."

"Don't judge my savings by yours. I know weel enough what I can afford," retorted Brodie roughly.

"Na! Na! I wouldna dream o' doin' that. Ye're so lavish wi' your money ye maun be worth a mint o' it. I'll warrant ye'll have a wheen o' siller stowed away for a rainy day," lisped Grierson ambiguously, as his eye flicked Brodie's with ironic insight.

"They say an opal's gey unlucky. The wife's sister had an opal ring that brought her a heap o' misfortune. She had an unco' bad slip the very month she got it," demurred Pax ton.

"That'll no' happen to me," replied Brodie coarsely.

"But are ye not feared to wear it?" persisted Paxton.

Brodie looked at him fixedly.

"Man," he said slowly, "you ought to know I'm feared of nothing on this God's earth."

Curiously, although he directed the most scrupulous attention towards his own attire and personal appearance, he would not for an instant entertain the idea of sprucing up his business premises by renewing the drab aspect of his shop, but seemed actually to glory in its unalterable, but recently accentuated, dinginess. When Perry, who had cast a persistently envious eye upon the growth of the dazzling magnificence next door, remarked upon the contrast and timidly suggested that perhaps a touch of paint might benefit the exterior, he said, impressively, "Not a finger do we lay on it. Them that wants to buy their hats in a painted panopticon can do so, but this is a gentleman's business and I'm going to keep it so." In this attitude he waited the first attack of the enemy.

With the final steps of restoration and reconstruction completed, at last the opening day of the rival establishment arrived. Astonishing progress had been made during the last week of March and a full blaring column in the Advertiser had announced that the first of April would mark the inauguration of the new establishment. Behind the thick, green blinds and shuttered entrance, a feeling of occult mysticism had prevailed during the whole of the previous day, and through this veil the district manager of the company, who had been deputed to take charge of the local branch for the initial months, had been observed flitting restlessly, like a shadow, symbolic of secrecy. Obviously the policy of the Mungo Company was to dazzle Levenford by their display in one sudden, blinding revelation; they would rend the cover from the windows and the Borough as a whole would be staggered by the vision of what it saw.

Such, at least, were Brodie's ironic thoughts as, on the first of April, he left his house at 9.30 to the second, no sooner, no later, and began the usual walk to his business in exactly his usual manner. As he came down the High Street in perfect composure he looked, although his manner was perhaps a trifle over emphasised, the least perturbed man in Levenford. The satirical nature of his reflections fed his vanity and consolidated his rooted belief in himself, stifling the vague misgiving that had for days fluttered at the back of his brain. Now that the moody period of waiting was at an end and the fight actually begun, he became once more the master of his fate and his bearing now seemed to say, "Let me get at it. I've been waitin' on this. And now you're ready for me, by God, I'm ready for you." He loved a fight. Furthermore, he felt spurred in this incentive to contest by his additional anticipation that the heat of the battle would remove his mind from the dull depression into which the blow to his intimate family pride had recently plunged him. Already his heart lifted to the joy of the fight as he told himself that he would show them the stuff that James Brodie was made of, would demonstrate again to the town the spirit that was in him, would, by a crushing defeat to the Mungo up- starts, restore his prestige in the eyes of the Borough to even a higher level than before. With a stiff back and expanded chest, with his stick cocked over his shoulder an exultant mannerism he had not indulged in for months he strode confidently along the street. He reached the new shop, saw instantly that, at last, it was open.

Whilst a lesser man might have, more circumspectly, completed his inspection by peering from the corner of his eye as he walked past, this prying was not in Brodie's nature, and he arrested himself openly, ostentatiously, in the middle of the pavement, and with his stick still upon his shoulder, his feet planted firmly apart, his massive head thrown back, he gazed sardonically at the double-fronted spectacle before him. A deliberate smile spread over his features. A ponderous guffaw shook him. His whole attitude became expressive of his delightful realisation that the display before him was more trashy and newfangled than he had dared to hope, more ludicrous than he had preconceived even in his wildest expectations. One window was crammed from floor to ceiling with hats, hats of every conceivable form, variety and style, mounting upwards in graduated tiers amongst festoons of ties and sprouting bouquets of coloured handkerchiefs, ornamented at tasteful intervals by garlands of socks and stockings, and embellished by an array of gloves arranged like fern fronds, with

limp yet politely extended fingers. The indication that the purpose of this strikingly artistic exhibition was not purely decorative was clearly, yet tactfully, conveyed by the fact that each article bore a small ticket stamped M.H.H., with the price in plain red figures below. But although he perceived this composite tableau, it was, however, the other window which riveted Brodie's quizzical attention, where his contemptuous eyes observed the unthoupht of novelty of two wax figures. Wax figures incredible! Still, there they were, a gentleman of perfect complexion and address gazing with fixed, ambiguous fondness upon the form of a small boy who, from his clear skin, wide blue eyes, and bland innocuous simper was undoubtedly the model son of this model father. They stood, the right hand of the father and the left hand of the son extended with the same delicate gesture, as if to say, "Here we are. Gaze upon us. We are here for your admiration."

Their clothing was immaculate, and Brodie's eye travelled from the creases of their trousers to the brilliance of their ties, over the glaze of their collars, the snowy whiteness of their prominent handkerchiefs, the sheen of sock and stocking, to the curly-brimmed Derby on the parental brow and the natty pill box upon the juvenile head, until finally it rested upon the neat card on which was printed:

"Dressed by the M. H. H. Co. Let us do the same for you."

"Dummies," muttered Brodie. "Demned dummies. It's not a hat shop; it's a demned waxworks." They represented to him the joke of a lifetime, for these figures had never been seen in Levenford although it had been recently rumoured that such innovations were appearing in the larger Glasgow warehouses and he considered that they would soon be the laughingstock of the Borough.

As he remained in arrogant contemplation, suddenly a man came out of the shop, carrying a brown paper parcel. Instantly Brodie's sneer was transfixed by a sudden mortifying apprehension and a pang shot through him like a knife stab. Had they, then, begun to do business already ? He had never seen the man before and he tried to reassure himself that, in all probability, this was merely a belated workman, performing some omitted task or collecting his forgotten gear; nevertheless, the neat parcel aroused his suspicion, disturbed him deeply, and in a less arrogant manner, he moved his firmly rooted limbs and went slowly through his own doorway.

Perry, inevitably, was there to greet him, moved this morning, by the progress of current events, to a more obsequious deference, and bearing in his mind perhaps the faint aspiration that he might, in the face of this new opposition, have the opportunity to show to his patron something of his real value, to achieve in some measure a realisation of his blighted hopes.

"Good morning to you, Mr. Brodie, sir." For this especial occasion Perry had concocted a mild witticism which he considered in his own mind both clever and amusing, and, plucking up all his courage, he now had the temerity to liberate it upon Brodie. "This is the first of April, sir," he said nervously. "Do you observe the inference, since they," he always referred to his new neighbours in this ambiguous manner "since they have opened on All Fools' Day."

"No," growled Brodie, looking from under his brows, "but tell me, you that's so clever."

"Well, it's all through the town, Mr. Brodie, that you'll make April gowks of them," gushed Perry, and, as he saw the effect of his remark, he tittered sympathetically, then writhed in the exuberance of his satisfaction, for Brodie had laughed shortly, pleased by the notion of the general adulation of the town implied in Perry's flattering, but, though he knew it not, fabricated remark. His huge fingers flexed in slowly on his palm.

"Ay, I'll mak' a gowk o' them, right enough! I'll take some o' the conceit out o' them, take some o' the gilt off their gingerbread. They don't know who they're up against yet, but, by gad, I'll learn them." How, exactly, he did not quite know, but at this moment, although he had no vestige of a settled policy in his brain, his confidence in his own ability to crush the opposition was supreme.

"Did ye notice the stookies in the window?" he queried absently.

"Yes! Oh yes! Mr. Brodie. A new idea from the larger houses. Rather original, of course, and up to date." In the first flush of his conversational success he had almost the optimism to hope that "the guv'nor" might perhaps order a brace of these intriguing models on the spot. His eyes glowed enthusiastically, but he had perforce to lower them under Brodie's glower, realising that he had this time said, apparently, the wrong thing.

"Up to date, ye say. It's like a deshed museum! They'll have a crowd round that bulter of a window o' theirs."

"But, sir," ventured Perry timidly, "is that not desirable? If you would attract people and draw their attention outside, they're more likely to come inside. It's a sort of advertisement."

Brodie looked at him obtusely for a moment, then growled angrily,

"Has the same bug been bitin' you, that you're itchin' for the common herd to batter at our doors ? If it has, get the poison out your system quick, or it'll be as much as your job is worth."

Perry looked at him humbly and observed meekly, "It's all grist to your mill though, sir." Then, removing himself to safer ground, he hastened to observe, "I see they're going in for a sort of general out fitting as well, Mr. Brodie, sir."

Brodie nodded sullenly.

"You wouldn't care to branch out with a few extra lines yourself sir, a novelty or two perhaps. Say a brace or a smart glove! Very refined indeed, a nice glove, sir." Perry almost pleaded at the bubbling urge of all the ideas repressed within him.

But his bright, insinuating suggestions fell on deaf ears. Brodie paid no heed to him, but stood, moved by an unusual impulse of self-analysis, absorbed in the contemplation of his strange departure from his invariable routine. Why, he asked himself, was he hanging about the shop instead of entering his office with his usual imperial negligence? He was going to smash them next door, of course, but would he do it by sitting calmly at his desk, attempting to read the Glasgow

Herald? He felt he must do something, take some definite line of conduct, but as he moved about, chafing at his desuetude, his sluggish mentality offered him no tangible suggestions towards the powerful action which he craved. If only he could have used the terrific strength of his body in this present cause, then he would have toiled till the sweat poured from him, till his joints cracked with the strain of his effort; he would willingly have embraced the supporting pillars of the opposing shop and, uprooting them, have dragged down the entire edifice about him; but some dim perception of the uselessness of his brute force dawned upon him and stung him bitterly.

At this point a woman, holding by the hand a small child of about six years of age, entered the shop. She was obviously of a poor class and advanced to Perry who greeted her deferentially.

"I wanted a bonnet for ma wee boy. He's goin' to the school next week!" she said confidentially.

Perry beamed upon her.

"Certainly, Madam! What can I show you for the little man?" Suddenly a strange impulse, a fierce inclination against his hated opposition, seized Brodie, and, although these customers were obviously of an inferior class and clearly of that type whom he invariably left to his assistant, he was impelled to go forward.

"Let me do it," he said, in a harsh, unreal tone.

The woman gazed at him timidly and, instinctively in awe of him, her lightly worn assurance fell from her; she became, not a lady who was selecting yes and paying for a hat to set her son bravely out upon the adventure of school, that first step upon the mysterious highway of life, but merely a mean, shabby, workman's wife.

"This young gentleman served me the last time," she whispered irresolutely, indicating Perry. "I was in last year and he suited me nicely."

The little boy instantly sensed his mother's discomfiture, felt also the lowering oppression of the huge, dark figure above him, and, burying his face in his mother's dress, he began to whine plaintively.

"Mammie! Mammie, I want to go hame," he sobbed. "I don't want to stay here. I want hame."

"Stop greetin' now. Stop your greetin' at once, will ye." The poor woman, utterly humiliated, stood discomposed and faltering, whilst the wailing child burrowed his head dourly into the sanctuary of her person; she shook him, and the more fiercely she shook him the louder he howled; her face coloured with shame and annoyance; she herself was near enough to tears. "Can that black-browed Brodie not keep out o' the place ? it's the bairn's hat I wanted not him," she thought angrily, as she lifted the yelling child in her arms and said

with great embarrassment, "I better come back another time. He's a bad boy. I'll come again when he can behave himself." While she cast, for appearance' sake, this specious aspersion against her own child, her outraged maternal instinct assured her that she would never return. She had turned to go and would have vanished irrevocably, when Perry in a low, tactful voice suggested tentatively from the background:

"Perhaps a sweetie?" And from an unsuspected recess in a drawer he adroitly produced a large peppermint drop and poised it prominently, alluringly, between his finger and thumb. Instantly the child stopped crying and, exposing one large, brimming, doubtful eye from out the folds of its mother's bodice, lifted it calculatingly towards the sweet. The mother, at this indication of trust, halted, questioningly regarding the child.

"Would you?" she queried.

With a final, convulsive sob the boy nodded his head trustingly towards Perry and stretched forward a small, avid claw. They returned. The sweet quickly bulged the wet, shining, young cheek, and, peace now being restored, Perry continued to soothe the child, to propitiate the mother, to minister to them both until, finally, the notable purchase, for such he now made them feel it to be, was satisfactorily effected. As they departed, he showed them to the door with the same ubiquitous courtesy, receiving the mother's last grateful glance upon the top of his lowered unassuming head, whilst Brodie, who had moved sullenly, ponderously, to the background, looked on gloomily.

Perry returned, rubbing his hands with satisfaction. Strange young man that he was, he built his conceit only upon his imaginary powers and took no credit for the undoubted attributes of quickness and intuition which were actually his; though he had just achieved a triumph of diplomacy and tact, yet his sole feeling was a humble satisfaction that he had saved the customer for Brodie before the eyes of the august master himself. He glanced up deferentially as the other spoke.

"I didna know we gave away sweeties wi' our hats," was all that Brodie said, as he turned sombrely into his office.

The day had begun; and it wore steadily on, with Brodie remaining still shut up in his room, immersed in his own intimate thoughts. Across his stern face shadows drifted like clouds across the face of a dark mountain. He suffered. Despite the iron hardness of his will, he could not prevent his responsive ears from quickening to every sound, from anticipating the gradual halting of footsteps as they drew near his shop, from analysing the lightest noise without his office, as if to differentiate the entry of a customer from Perry's restless

pacings; yet, to-day, he felt that, though he had never before consciously noted them, the sounds were few and unsuggestive. The sun poured through the window upon him, the slush of the thaw which had succeeded the long frost was now completely gone, and the day was crisply dry, yet warm, so that in this dawning hint of spring the streets would, he knew, fill with people, happy, eager, thronging the shops; yet no chatter of enquiring voices broke the outer silence.

The blank, dividing wall which stood before him seemed to dissolve under his piercing gaze and reveal, in the premises next door, a bustling and successful activity. A reaction from his sneering confidence of the morning took him and he now morbidly visioned crowds of people jostling each other there in a passionate eagdness to buy. Savagely he bit his lip and again picked up his discarded paper in an effort to read; but in a few moments, to his annoyance, he returned to himself to find that he was gazing stupidly at the wall in front: as though it hypnotised him.

Moodily, he reflected how delightful it had been in the past to lie back in his chair for what else had he done with an eye through the half-open door, lording it over Perry and those who entered his domain. The menial duties of the business were entirely Perry's, who fetched and carried to his royal word, and he himself had not mounted the steps or lifted his hand to the shelves, or bound

up a parcel for longer than he could remember. Most customers he ignored; with some he would stroll in whilst they were being served, nod casually, pick up the hat under review, pass his hand over its nap or bend the brim in haughty approval of his own merchandise, saying with his air, "Take it or leave it, but ye'll not get a better hat anywhere." Towards only a few, a handful from the best families of the county, did he actually direct his personal service and attention.

It had then been so delightful to feel assured that people must come to him, for, in his blind autocratic way, he had scarcely realised, had not paused to consider, that the absence of competition and lack or choice might drive many people to him, that necessity might be the mainstay of his business; but now, as he sat alone, he became unhappily aware that, for the time being at least, his monopoly was at an end. Nevertheless he would not, he firmly determined, alter his conduct; if he had not been obliged to run after people to solicit their paltry custom, he would not now be coerced into so doing; he had run after no man in his life and he now swore a solemn oath that he would never do so.

The dim, early days of his beginning in Levenford, so long since that he had almost forgotten, returned mistily to him; but through these mists he saw himself as a man who had never curried favour, nor fawned, nor acted the subservient toady. Though there had been no Perry then, he had been upright and honest and determined, had worked hard and asked no favour. And he had succeeded. He glowed as he thought of his slow rise in importance and consequence, of his recognition by the Council, his election to the Philosophical Club, of the gradual conception of his house, of its building and, since that date, of the growing and subtle change in his situation to that unique, isolated, notable position which he now held in the town. It was, he told himself, the good blood that ran in his veins which had done that for him, which had brought him to the top, where he belonged, despite the handicaps which had beset him in his youth, that blood of his ancestors which as in a noble horse would always tell and which would not fail him now.

Waves of anger at the injustice of his present position swept in on him and he jumped to his feet. "Let them try to take it from me," he cried aloud, raising up his fist; "let them all come! I'll wipe them out like I destroy all who offend me. There was a rotten branch on the tree of my name," he shouted loudly, "and I cut it off. I'll smash everybody that interferes with me. I am James Brodie and be damned to everybody and everything. Let them try to hinder me, to thieve my trade from me, try to take all I've got; let them do it! Whatever comes, I am still myself."

He subsided in his chair, unconscious of the fact that he had arisen, unaware that he had shouted to the empty room, but hugging only, with a gloating satisfaction, that last precious thought. He was himself James Brodie no one but he understood, could ever comprehend, the full comfort, the delicious pride which that possession gave him. His thoughts rioted away from his present vicissitudes into a land of exalted dreams and longings, and, with his head sunk in his chest, he lost himself in the sublime contemplation of some future day when, unchecked, he would unleash the uncontrolled desires of his pride, when he would appease to satiation his craving for eminence and homage.

At last he sighed and, like a man awakening from the dreams of a drugged sleep, he blinked and shook himself. He looked at his watch, realised with a start that the end of this day, and of his self-ordained seclusion, was approaching. He arose slowly, yawned prodigiously, stretched himself, and, banishing from his features all traces of his recent indulgent reverie, stiffened his face again into a mask of hard indifference and went into the shop to review, as was his custom, the business of the day. This was invariably a pleasant duty, into which

he infused a lordly dignity, giving himself the air of a feudal ruler receiving tribute from his vassal. Always Perry had a heap of gleaming silver, often a few gleaming sovereigns and sometimes a rustling bank note to be transferred to the master's deep, hip pocket; and, when this had been effected, Brodie would run a casual eye over the list of sales casual, inasmuch as he recognised that Perry would never cheat him it would, in his own words "have been a pity for the little runt had he tried" would slap his bulging pocket, assume his hat and, with a last curt command, be off, leaving Perry to close up and shutter the shop.

But, to-night, an unusual air seemed to cling to Perry, giving him an aspect at once blurred and disconsolate. Usually he opened the cash drawer with a proud and subservient flourish, as though to say, "We may not be much, but this is what we've done for you to-day, Mr. Brodie, sir." Now, however, he pulled the drawer timidly open, with a faint deprecating twitch.

"A very quiet day, sir," he said meekly.

"The weather's been good," remonstrated Brodie testily. "What have you been playin' at? There's been plenty of folks about."

"Oh! There's been a stir on the streets," replied Perry, "but quite a number that's to say, a few have gone in " He faltered. "They had an attractive window," he concluded lamely.

Brodie looked down at the drawer. Only six, miserable silver shillings lay in the till.

IV

THE Levenford Philosophical Club was in convocation. Although to-night the session was by no means a plenary one, the room was comfortably filled by smoke and by a gathering of six members who, ranged in comfortable chairs around the cordial fire which blazed upon the hearth, philosophised in this congenial atmosphere at their ease. Of those present, two were engaged upon a silent game of draughts, easy, harmonious, relaxed, whilst the others lay back, smoked, talked, and wooed the inspiration of worthy thoughts by frequent, comforting sips of their grog.

The conversation was sporadic, the pauses, despite the choice richness of the language employed, sometimes more pregnant than the actual spoken words, the wave of a pipe more pungent than a pithy adjective, the glances of the members abstract, cogitative and intellectually remote. Wearing modestly the distinction of their higher cerebration, they sat within the hallowed precincts of the club the rallying point of all these honest burghers in Levenford who might claim to be more notable than their fellow men and, in the consciousness of their distinction, were at least content. To have achieved this club was, in itself, a feat which immediately conferred a cachet upon these happy individuals and rendered each the envy of less fortunate beings. To these the member would remark, of an evening, with, perchance, a nonchalant yawn, "Well! I think I'll away down to the club. There's a bit discussion on the night", and saunter off, whilst jealous eyes followed him down the street. To outsiders, those not of the elect, the social prestige of the club loomed largely, but so, also, did the suggestion of its profound intellectual significance, for the sonorous name Philosophical breathed of the rarer and more refined realms of pure reason.

True, a classical master who had come to the Levenford Academy, bearing the letters of a degree of Oxford University after his name, had remarked to a colleague, "I was keen to join when I heard the name but to my disgust, I discovered it was nothing more than a smoking and drinking clique."

What did he know, the ignorant English clown? Was he unaware of the six lectures, followed by lengthy debates, which took place at regular intervals during the winter? Had he not seen the neatly printed syllabus, which, like an amulet, reposed invariably in each member's top, right-hand, waistcoat pocket, containing the titles of this year's subjects of information and discussion? Had he but chosen he might have cast his grudging eyes upon such profound themes as:

"Our Immortal Bard with Readings,"

"The Homing Pigeon in Health and Sickness,"

"The Growth of Shipbuilding in the Royal Borough on the Clyde,"

"Scottish Wit and Humour with Local Anecdotes," or even,

"From Rivet-boy to Provost the Life Story of the Late Respected

Mathias Gloag of Levenford."

Such, indeed, were the weighty lectures to be delivered, but if, on these evenings when the associates' brains were not taxed by these deep matters, and their minds disengaged from solving the problems of race and nation, some trifling relaxation occurred what disgrace lay in a gossip or a smoke, a game of the dambrod or even whist? And, as Phemie's tidy house was convenient to the back door, what harm was it to send around occasionally for a bit glass or even to adjourn at times to the "wee back parlour?"

Such arguments were, of course, unanswerable! It was in addition, the function and practice of this unofficial town council to discuss in detail and sit in deliberation upon the people of the Borough and their affairs. The ramifications of this subsidiary branch of their philosophising ranged from such diverse matters as the shrewish temper of Gibson's wife to the appropriate remonstration to be made to Blair of the Main's Farm regarding the insanitary propensities of his cows upon the public highway; and a singularly reassuring feature, speaking volumes for Levenford equity, was the fact that the very members themselves had no prerogative or privilege immunising them from discussion by their fellow commentators. To-night, James Brodie was the subject of the discussion initiated by a chance glance at the empty chair in the corner, a contemplative pause, and the remark:

"Brodie's late to-night. I wonder will he be comin'."

"He'll be here, right enough," remarked Provost Gordon. "I've never known him so regular. He maun keep up his morale, ye ken."

He looked round for approval at the use of this appropriate and noble-sounding word. "What I mean to infer," he explained, "is that he's got to put a face on things now, or else go under a' thegether."

The others sucked at their pipes and nodded silently. One of the draughts players moved a man, then looked up reflectively into the warm aromatic air, and said:

"Dod! time passes like a flash! It must be nearly a year now since he flung out that daughter o' his, on the night o' the big storm."

Paxton, who had the reputation of a head for figures, remarked:

"It'll be a year exactly in a fortnight's time; but it micht be a single day for all that Levenford's seen o' Mary Brodie since then. I aye maintained, and I still maintain, that it was a bitter cruel thing that James Brodie did that night."

"Where is the lassock now?" queried some one.

"Weel," responded Paxton, "the story was that the Foyles of Darroch got her a position; but that's a' nonsense. She went off all by herself. The doctor wished to help her but she just up and away. It's said now that she's got a post in a big house in London nothin’ more nor less than a servant she would be puir thing. The Foyles didna do a thing for her afore they went back to Ireland."

"That's right' said the second draughts player; "old Foyle was fair broken up by the loss o' that boy o' his. 'Twas an awfu' thing, and no mistake, that Tay Bridge disaster. I'll never forget that night. I had been out at the guid sister's and had to get back hame in the teeth o' the wind, when a flyin' slate skiffed my ear by an inch. It nearly took ma heid off."

"That wad have been a worse calamity to the town than the loss o' the bridge, John," sniggered Grierson from his corner. "We would need to ha' put ye up a braw monument at the Cross, like the braw new Livingstone statue in George Square up in the city. Think what ye've missed. If it had struck ye, man, ye would have been another o' Scotland's heroes."

"Weel, the new bridge maun be a bit stronger before they get me to gang across it. 'Twas a perfect scandal that a' they good lives were flung awa'. I contend there should have been a punishment for them that was to blame," said the first draughts player, covering the discomfiture of his companion.

"Man! Ye canna punish the Almighty," drawled Grierson: " 'twas an act of God, and ye canna claim damages off Him at least not successfully."

"Wheesht, man, Grierson," admonished the Provost by virtue of his position. "Watch that tongue o' yours; that's downright blasphemy ye're talkin'."

"Na! Na! Provost," soothed Grierson. "It's juist the law a wee bit o' the law, ye ken. No offence to the company, or the Almighty, or yourself," he added, with a leer.

There was an uncomfortable pause, when it looked as if the harmony of the discussion might be destroyed, but eventually the Provost continued:

"Brodie maun be losing trade hand over fist these days. I never see a soul in his shop."

"The prices the Mungo Company's sellin' at wad empty anybody's shop that tried to compete wi' them," said Paxton, with some show of sympathy. "They've made up their minds to feenish him first and make their profits after. He's got on the wrang side o' the fence a' thegether. It looks to me gey like ruin."

"Ruin is the richt word," drawled Grierson, who from his corner looked knowingly as if he could, if he chose, disclose a large, ripe plum of information on the subject.

"But he maun be a warm man though, Brodie. He's aye free o' his money splashin' it about like water, spendin' it on onything that might take his fancy. He has the best o' everything, and then ye wad think that wasna good enough for him. Look at his dress, look at his braw new tie-pin and signet ring, and besides," the speaker looked around cautiously before he uttered the next words, "look at his graund country castle." A slight smirk seemed to traverse the entire party and covert glances of well-subdued amusement were exchanged.

"Look at his auld wife's boots, her elegant clothes and braw appearance," replied Grierson. "Look at his bank balance his wee Nessie was a fortnight late wi' her fees at the Academy this quarter. Look at the flicker in his proud eye when he thinks ye Ye not watchin' him. I tell you that the big, big man that he thinks he is is beginnin' to feel a wee bittie vexed about things." An intense undercurrent of innuendo lay behind the words as he continued, "I may be wrong but, in my humble opinion, I consider that James Brodie is goin' through the worst time o' his life. And if he's not careful, he'll be down where he's flung many another man right down in the gutter!"

"Ay, he's an awfu' man to make enemies. Speakin' o' the gutter, though, I maun tell you this one." Paxton took a few reflective draws at his pipe. "I was passin' Brodie's shop the other Saturday night when a kind o' commotion stopped me." He puffed again twice. "There was a big, drunken street worker in the shop, fu' as a whelk, and fu' o' his week's wages - in the mood to fling out the pound notes like a harrier's trail I saw the roll o' notes in his hand and he stood there swayin' afore Brodie, ordering a couple o' hats and a couple o' bonnets, and this and that and goodness knows a' what. He was in the mood to buy up the whole shop, ay and pay for 't too. Brodie, and God knows he must have needed the money sorely, stood glarin' at him out o' his starin' red eye." Reaching the climax of his story he sucked interminably at his pipe, before removing it, pointing it emphatically, and proceeding. " 'If ye can't say 'please’ when ye address me,' Brodie was snarlin', 'then ye'll get nothing here. Other places,' he sneered, 'might stand that style o' thing. Go there if ye choose, but if ye come to me ye'll behave yourself or get out.' I didna hear what the other said in reply, but it must have outraged Brodie frightful, for he louped the counter and gripped the other's neck, and before ye could say knife had flung him out o' the shop right into the dirty gutter, where he lay, knocked stupid, at my feet."

A pregnant pause succeeded the anecdote.

"Ay," sighed the first draughts player at last, "he has an uncommon temper. His pride is fair terrifyin’ now. It's his worst enemy. He used no' to be so conspicuous in that respect, but of late years it's fair run awa' wi' him. He's as proud as Lucifer."

"And 'tis my belief he'll have the same fall," inserted Grierson. "He's bloated with his own vanity ! It's worked on him till it's like a very mania."

"And the rideeclous cause o't too!" said Paxton, in a low cautious tone; "that claimin' kinship wi' the Wintons! I'll swear he thinks he should be the Earl himself. 'Tis strange too, the way he hides it, yet feasts on it."

"They wouldna own him. Brodie may have the name. He may look like the Wintons. But what's in a name and what's in a likeness?" said the first draughts player. "He hasna a shadow o' proof."

"I'm afeared what proof there was had a big, black bar through it," remarked Grierson judicially; "for I'm gey and certain that onything that might have happened lang back took place the wrang side o' the blanket. That's why our friend willna blatter it out. That's maybe the bonnie kinship."

"'Tis not only kinship that he claims," said Provost Gordon slowly. "Na! Na! The disease has swelled beyond that. I hardly like to come over it to ye and 'deed I'm hardly sure myself, but I’ll mention no names and ye mustna repeat it. I had it from a man who saw James Brodie when he was the worse o' liquor, mad ravin’

drunk. There's no' many has seen that," he continued, "for he's a close man in they things. But this night his dour tongue was loosed and he talked and "

"Another time, Provost," cried Paxton suddenly. "Wheesht, man, wheesht."

"Talk o' the deevil."

"About that new trap o' yours now, Provost, will ye "

Brodie had entered the room. He came in heavily, blinking at the sudden transition from the darkness to the lighted room and frowning from the bitter suspicion that he had been at the moment of his entry the object of their backbiting tongues. His dour, hard face had to-night a pale grimness, as he looked around the company, nodding his head silently several times in salutation, more in the manner of a challenge than a greeting.

"Come away in, come away in," remarked Grierson smoothly; "we were just wonderin' if the rain that was threatenin' had come on yet."

"It's still dry," said Brodie gruffly. His voice was flat, had lost its old resonant timbre, was, like the brooding mask of his face, inexpressive of anything but stoic endurance. He took out his pipe and began to fill it. An old man, the messenger and factotum of the club, dignified as such by a green baize apron, put his head around the door in speechless enquiry, and to him Brodie shortly remarked,

"The usual."

A momentary silence descended upon the group whilst the old man retreated, was absent, returned shamblingly with a large whisky for Brodie, then finally departed. The Provost felt it his duty to break the awkward stillness which had descended upon the group and, looking at Brodie, he said, in a kindly tone, moved in spite of himself by the other's ghastly look:

"Well, Brodie man, how are things with ye? How's the world waggin' now?"

"Oh! Fair, Provost! very fair," replied Brodie slowly, "Nothing to complain about." The grim assumption of indifference in his tone was almost tragic and deceived none of the assembly, but Gordon, with an assumption of heartiness, retorted:

"That's fine! That's the ticket! We're expectin' every day to see the Mungo Company wi' the shutters up.”

Brodie accepted this polite fiction and the spurious murmur of assent from the group which followed it, not with the blatant satisfaction which it would have provoked six months ago but, in the face of his present position, with a blank indifference which the others did not fail to observe. They might discuss him freely in his absence, criticise, condemn, or even vilify him, but when he was in their midst their strongly expressed feelings weakened sensibly under the shadow of his actual presence and they were impelled, often against their wish, to make some flattering remark which they did not mean and which they had not intended to utter.

He was a man whom they thought wiser to humour; better to keep on the right side of, safer to propitiate than to enrage; but now, as they noted his moody humour and slyly watched his oppressed demeanour, they wondered if his iron control might be at last beginning to fail him.

A gentle, insinuating voice from the corner, addressing the company at large, broke into their general air of meditation.

"If you Ye thinkin' o' the Company's shutters goin' up you'll a' have to bide a wee na, na, they'll not be shuttin' up shop for a bit, anyway not for a bittie," drawled Grierson.

"How's that?" queried some one.

"Oh! Just a little private information," answered Grierson complacently, pursing his lips, placing his finger tips together and beaming on the company, especially upon Brodie, with an aspect of secret yet benevolent comprehension. Brodie looked up quickly from beneath his tufted eyebrows, not fearing the man but dreading, from his past experience, the sly, meek attitude which betokened in the other a deep and calculating venom.

"What is it then, man?" asked Paxton. "Out with it!"

But now that he had thoroughly aroused their curiosity, Grierson was in no haste to divulge his secret information and still smiled sleekly, keeping them on tenterhooks, tantalising them with the plum which would not drop from his lips until it was juicy with ripeness.

"Odd! You wouldna be interested," he purred. " Tis just a lettle piece o' local news I happened to get wind o' privately."

"Do you know yourself, Brodie?" asked Paxton, in an effort to terminate the irritating procrastination.

Brodie shook his head mutely, thinking bitterly how Grierson got his finger first into every pie, how he was always the last to remove it.

"It's just a wee, insignificant bit of information," Grierson said, with increased satisfaction.

"Then out with it, ye sly deevil!"

"Well, if you must know, the district manager o' Mungo's is goin' away, now that they're so firmly established. I'm told they're doin’ uncommon weel." He smiled blandly at Brodie and continued, "Ay! They've made a clever move too, in offering the vacant post and a real fine post it is an' all to a Levenford man. He's been offered it and he's accepted it."

"Who is 't then?" cried several voices.

"Oh, he's a real deservin' chap, is the new local manager o' the Mungo Company."

"What's his name then?"

"It's our friend's assistant, none other than young Peter Perry," drawled Grierson, with a triumphant wave of his hand towards Brodie.

Immediately a babble of comment broke out.

"Man, ye don't say so!"

"The auld, weedowed mother will be unco' pleased about that.”

"What a step up for the young fellow!"

"He would jump at it like a cock at a groset."

Then, as the first flush of excitement at the unexpected titbit of local gossip subsided, and the real realisation of its meaning to Brodie dawned upon them, a silence fell, and all eyes were turned upon him. He sat perfectly still, stunned at the news, every muscle in his huge body rigid, his jaw set, his teeth gripping the stem of his pipe with the increasing pressure of a slowly closing vice. So Perry was leaving him, Perry, upon whom of late he had come to depend utterly, realising at last that he had himself got out of the way of serving, that he was above it now and was unable to lower himself to such lackey's work had he even desired it. A sharp crack split the attentive silence, as, with the onset of a pang of sudden bitterness, his teeth compressed themselves with such a vicious, final force upon his pipe that the stem snapped through. As though in a trance, he looked at the riven pipe in his hand for a long second, then spat out the broken end coarsely upon the floor, looked again stupidly at the ruined meerschaum and muttered to himself, unconscious that they heard him;

"I liked that pipe liked it weel. It was my favourite."

Then he became aware of the ring of faces regarding him as though he sat in an arena for their contemplation, became aware that he must show them how he met the bitter shock of the blow, or better, show them that it held no bitterness for him. He stretched out towards his glass, raised it to his lips with a hand as steady as a rock, looked steadily back at Grierson, whose gaze immediately slipped off that unwavering stare. He would at that moment have given his right hand for the power to utter some cutting, withering retort which would shrivel the other by its very potency, but, despite a fury of endeavour, his brain was not sufficiently agile, his slow, ponderous wit refused to function, and all that he could do was to say, with an attempt at his habitual, sneering grimace:

"It's of no concern, not the slightest! Not the slightest concern to me!"

"I hope he'll not take any o' your trade with him," said Paxton solicitously.

"Now I come to think on't, 'tis a downright dirty trick, Mr. Brodie," came in a toadying tone from one of the draughts players. "He ken's a' your customers."

"Trust these Mungo bodies to move smartly. They're a deevelish clever lot, in my opeenion," said another voice.

"Myself, I think it's raither a poor spirit," drawled Grierson considcringly. "Somehow it gives me the impression that he's just like a rat leavin' the sinkin' ship."

There was a sudden hush whilst every one sat aghast at the audacity of his remark, the most direct affront that had ever been offered to Brodie in that clubroom. They expected him to arise and rend the puny form of Grierson, tear him apart by the sudden exertion of his brute strength, but instead he remained inert, unheeding, as if he had not heard or understood the other's remark. With his thoughts sunk in a gloomy abyss, he reflected that this was the most deadly blow he had suffered of any, although already they had smote him hip and thigh.

They had lavished their abundant capital in the struggle against him. In a dozen ways had exercised their ingenious cunning, but now in taking Perry they had snapped his last mainstay. Appropriately, he recollected his assistant's strange suppressed manner that night, his half-intimidated, half-exultant look, as if he had been glad yet regretful, as if he had wished to speak and yet could not summon courage to do so. Strangely, he did not blame Perry, realising in justice

that the other had merely accepted a better offer than he could have made; instead, any animosity that stirred within him turned against the Mungo Company itself. His feeling, however, was at this moment not truly one of hatred, but rather of curious compassion for himself, a sad consideration that he, so noble, so worthy, should suffer at such treacherous hands, should in consequence be compelled continually to assume this false front of indifference, when hitherto his careless arrogance had, unwittingly, protected him like armour. Then, amongst his meditations, he became again aware of the circle of watching eyes and the imperative need for speech, and hardly knowing what he said, yet whipping himself to anger, he began:

"I've always fought fair! I've always fought wi' clean hands. I wouldna lower myself to the level o' bribery and corruption, and if they've bribed that pimply little snipe to leave me, then they're gey and welcome to him. It'll save me the bother o' sackin' him ay, they can keep him while they last. I don't give a tinker's curse about the whole affair."

Reassured by his own speech, carried away by the expression of a sentiment he had not felt, his words grew louder, more confident, his glance more defiant and assured. "No! Not a tinker's damn do I give," he cried. "But I'll not have him back again. Oh, dear, no! Let him draw his bribes while he can and when he's able for when they're burst and a' to hell, and he comes whinin' back for his auld job, then I'll see him in hell as weel, before I lift a hand to help him. He's unco' quick to run away; I've no doubt he thinks his fortune's mac l e the poor fool but when he's back in the ditch I took him out o', he'll regret the day he ever left the house o' James Brodie."

He was transfigured, exalted by his speech, now believing utterly in this declamation which contrasted so absolutely with his sombre, sensible perception of a moment before; and, his spirit asserting itself more powerfully in the very recognition of its power, he glared back at them with wide, excited pupils. He hugged within himself the reflection that he could still control, dominate, overawe them, and as at last an idea, delightful and appropriate, struck him, he drew himself up and cried:

"No! It'll take more than that to upset James Brodie in spite o' what our wee friend in the corner has had the nerve to suggest. When ye hear me complainin', it'll be enough to get out your crape, and it'll be a lang, lang time before ye need mournin' on that account. It's a joke, though," his eye flickered round them with a rampant facetiousness "by gad! It's a joke that's worth a dram to us a'.

“Gentlemen," he cried, in a lordly voice, "shall we adjourn so that you may join me in a glass?"

They at once applauded him, delighted with his generous spirit, delighted at the thought of free refreshment, scenting ahead the chance of a carousal.

"Good for you, Brodie!"

"Scotland for ever! A man's a man for a' that."

"I'm wi' ye, juist a wee deoch-an-dorris to keep out the cauld."

"There's life in the auld horse yet!"

The Provost himself slapped him on the back. "Man, Brodie! You're a caution. Ye've the pluck o' a lion, the strength o' a bull, ay, and the pride o' the deevil there's no bcatin' of ye. I believe ye wad dee before ye took a lickin'."

At these words they stood up, concurring, and all but Grierson swarmed round him so that he stood amongst them, his fierce glance encompassing them, encouraging yet rebuking, sanctioning yet subduing, approving yet admonishing, like an emperor surrounded by his court. His blood, the blood that was noble like an emperor's, coursed more imperially in his veins than did the thin, serous fluid that was in theirs. In his heavy brain he felt he had achieved a great and noble action, that his gesture, in the teeth of disaster had been sublime.

"Lay on, MacDuff," they cried, stirred by the unwonted laxity and magnanimity of his usually unapproachable nature, impatient to savour the rich, golden liquor he would provide for them. As he led them through the back door of the club into the outer air and they filed, eventually, into Phemie's wee back parlour, he felt the danger was over, that he was again the master of them.

Soon the drinks were flowing as they toasted him jubilantly, in McDonald's finest Chieftain whisky, for his generosity, his discrimination, his strength. As he flung out a golden sovereign, birling it grandly on to the round, mahogany table, a faint glimmering of sense at the back of his mind whispered to him how little he could afford it now, but he thrust the thought back again, stamped it out fiercely with a loud, "Here's to us wha's like us?"

"It's a be-autiful dram, this," purred Grierson, smacking his lips appreciatively as he held his glass up to the light. "A beautiful dram, mild as mother's milk and smooth as weel smooth as the nap on one o' our friend's braw hats. The only pity is that it's so deshed more expensive than orner stuff." He tittered spitefully, knowingly, towards Brodie.

"Drink it up then, man!" replied Brodie loudly. "Lap it up when ye get the chance. You're no' payin' for't. By God, if we were a' as mean as you, the world would stop goin' round."

"That's one to put in your pipe, Grierson," laughed Paxton, hoarsely.

"Speakin' o' stinginess did ye hear the latest one about our wee friend here?" cried the Provost, with a nod towards Grierson and a wink at Brodie.

"No! What was it?" they chorused. "Tell us, Provost."

"Weel," replied Gordon, with a knowing look, "it' short and sweet. The other day a wheen bairns were playin' about outside our friend's grain store, beside a big sack o' beans at the door, when up comes the son o' the house. "Get away, boys," young Grierson cries, "and don't touch these beans or my feyther'll find out. He's got every one o' them counted!"

A roar of appreciation arose from the assembly, through which Grierson murmured easily, blinking through the smoke:

"I'll no deny I ken how many beans make five, Provost, but it's a handy thing these days wi' so much hardship and poverty about."

But Brodie, upon his throne, the already warmed pith of him flaming under the potent whisky, neither heard nor heeded the innuendo as, filled with a wild elation, the desire to act, to liberate his strength, to smash something, seized him and, raising his empty glass high above his head, he suddenly shouted, without point in the , conversation, "To hell with them! To hell with these measly Mungo swine!" and shattered the heavy tumbler violently against the wall.

The others, now mellow for his mood, responded gleefully.

"That's the spirit!"

"Another round, gentlemen."

"No heeltaps."

"Gie us a song, Wullie."

"Speech! Speech!" came their shouts.

At this point a discreet knock upon the door, followed by the noiseless entry, felt-slippered yet formidable, of the landlady, interrupted the fluid current of their hilarity.

"Ye're merry the night, Gentlemen," she said with a thin, tight-lipped smile which inferred that their gaiety was not entirely becoming to them or wholly pleasing to her. "I hope ye'll no' forget the good name o' the house." Much as she valued their connection she was too remote, too virtuous, altogether too much of an institution to be imposed upon by them. "I dinna like to hear the smash o' glass," she added acidly.

"Tits, Phemie, woman, it'll be paid for," cried Brodie. She nodded slightly, as though to convey to him that she had already taken that for granted, but in a slightly mollified tone she remarked:

"What's the occasion?"

"Just a little celebration given by our esteemed member at the head o' the table," murmured Grierson. "I dinna ken what it's to celebrate, exactly, but ye micht ca' it a beanfeast without ony beans."

"Never mind him, Phemie; send us in another hauf mutchkin," cried a voice.

"Well ye have a wee hauf yersel', Phemie?" remarked the Provost, breezily.

"Come awa' and sit on my knee, Phemie," cried one of the erstwhile draughts players now, alas, incapable of differentiating a crowned man from a peppermint oddfellow.

"Send in the whisky, Phemie," demanded Brodie. "Ill make them a' behave themselves."

She reproved them individually and collectively with her glance, raised a warning forefinger, and padded out as silently as she had come, murmuring as she went:

"Dinna forget the name o' the house. I'll send ye in the speerits, but ye maun keep quiet; ye maun mind the good name o' the house."

When she had gone the ball of their gaiety rolled of? again, quickly gathered speed, and bounded more exuberantly than before.

"Never mind Phemie," cried a voice; "her bark is waur than her bite, but her face is waur than the two o' them thegither."

"Ye wad think this public o' hers was a tabernacle o' righteousness," cried another, "she's that uncommon godly about it. She wad have ye drink like ye were in the kirk."

"There's a braw, wee tittle in the front pews, onyway," replied the more bibulous draughts player. "They say Nancy, the barmaid, is as obleegin' as she's bonnie." He winked round the assembly knowingly.

"Tits, man, tits!" cried the Provost reprovingly. "Don't 'file the nest that you're sittin' in."

"That's the cuckoo ye wad be meanin'," replied the other agreeably; "but I'm no' that."

"Would ye like me to give ye a verse o' Burns?" called out Paxton. "I'm just ripe to let ye have 'The Deil amang the Tailors.' "

"Our chairman promised us a bit speech, did he not?" remarked Grierson insinuatingly.

"Ay! Come awa' wi' that speech ye were goin' to give us," cried the Provost.

"Speech!" they insisted again. "Speech from the chairman."

Brodie's soaring pride, wafted higher by their tipsy cries, reached upward to a sublimated region where his limitations ceased, in the refined air of which his tongue seemed fluent, his incapacity for the articulate utterance of his inner thoughts forgotten.

"Very well," he called out, "I'll give ye a speech." He rose, inflating his chest, widening his eyes at them, swinging slightly from side to side on the fulcrum of his feet, wondering, now that he had risen, what he should say.

"Gentlemen," he began at length, slowly, but amidst ready applause, "ye all know who I am. I'm Brodie, James Brodie, and what that name means, maybe ye can guess." He paused, surveying each member of the group in turn. "Ay, I'm James Brodie, and in the Royal Borough of Levenford, and beyond it too, it is a name that is respected and esteemed. Show me the man that says a word against it and I'll show you what these two hands will do to him." He shot out his huge hands wildly and let them throttle the vacant air before him, missing in his emotion the general apathy, the gloating relish in Grierson's satirical eyes, and seeing only reverence. "If I but chose I could tell you something that would startle ye to the very core."

Then, as his blurred glance swept around the table, he lowered his voice to a hoarse, confidential whisper, shook his head cunningly.

"But no! I'm not goin' to do it! Guess if ye like, but I'm not goin' to tell ye now ye may never know. Never!" He shouted the word. "But h's there; and so long as I breathe breath into this body o' mine, I will uphold my name. I've had an unco trouble lately that would have bent a strong man and broken a weaker one, but what has it done to me? I'm still here, still the same James Brodie, but stronger, more determined than before. If your hand offend ye cut it off' says the Scriptures Fve had to cut my own flesh and blood; ay, but it was without flinchin' that I used the axe. I've had trouble within and trouble without, sneakin' rogues and thievin' swine at my very ain door, false friends and dirty enemies round about me, ay and sly, sleekit backbiters as weel." He looked grimly at Grierson. "But through it all and above it all, James Brodie will stand hard and fast like the Castle Rock; ay and wi' his head as high above the air," he shouted, thumping his chest with his big fist and concluding in a loud full voice, "1 tell ye I'll show ye all! Ill show every one o' ye."

Then, having readied the climax of his feelings, for the spontaneous words had rushed from him unknowingly at the urge of his emotions, he sat down heavily, saying in a natural undertone, "And now we'll have another dram all round."

The last part of his speech was appreciated, loudly cheered, applauded by a rattle of glasses upon the hard table, echoed by Grierson's suave drawl:

"Good! I havena enjoyed a speech like that since Drucken Tarn harangued the Baillies through the windae o' the jail."

They drank to him, to his oration, to his future; some one sang in a broken falsetto; Paxton protested, unheeded, that he too wanted to make a speech; the second draughts player attempted to tell a long, involved and unseemly story; there were several songs with shouted choruses. Then, abruptly, Brodie, who had, with altered mood, remained cold, impassive and disdainful amongst their mirth,

jerked back his chair and got up to go. He knew the value of these sudden departures, felt the restrained dignity of his leaving the sodden dogs to sing and rant in the fashion that fitted them, whilst he departed at the moment when he could so retire with majesty and honour.

"What's the matter, man? Ye're not awa' hame yet," cried the Provost. "It's not near struck the twaP yet!"

"Bide a wee and well punish another haulf mutchkin atwccn us a'."

"Is the wee wifie waitin' on ye, then?" whispered Grierson blandly.

"I'm away," he cried roughly, buttoning up his jacket and stamping his feet, and, ignoring their profuse protests, he looked at them solemnly, saying:

"Gentlemen! Good night."

Their shouts followed him out of the room into the cool night wind and filled him with a thrilling elation which increased inversely as the sounds of their homage weakened; the cries were like hosannahs, diminishing, yet pursuing, on the cold, sweet air that rose like frosted incense from the rimed streets. It had been a night, he told himself, as he made his way homewards amongst the white- limned houses that stood like silent temples in a deserted city, and, as he swelled with self-esteem, he felt he had justified himself in his own and in their eyes. The whisky in him made his step elastic, springy and youthful; he wanted to walk over mountains in this crisping exaltation that sparked equally within him and in the delicious atmosphere around him; his body tingled and he thought in terms of wild, erotic, incoherent desires, peopling the dark rooms of

every house he passed with concealed yet intimate activity, feeling, with a galling sense of injustice, that he must in future find some outlet for the surge of his suppressed and unattracted flesh. The short distance which he traversed to his home whetted his appetite for some fitting termination to the glorious evening and, almost in expectation, he let himself into his house and shot home the lock of the outer door with a flourish of the heavy key.

A light, he observed, still burned in the kitchen, a manifestation at once unusual and disturbing, as, when he came in late, all lights had been extinguished save that which burned faithfully in the hall, waiting to illuminate his return. He looked at his watch, saw the time to be half-past eleven, then viewed again the light which winked at him in the dim hall as it shone from beneath the closed door. With a frown he replaced his watch, stalked along the lobby, and seizing the door handle firmly, with one push burst into the kitchen; there he stood erect, surveying the room and the figure of his wife, as she sat crouching over the dull embers of the fire. At his entry she started, oppressed, although she awaited him, by the sudden intrusion into her dejected reverie of his frowning, unspoken disapproval. As she looked around in trepidation, showing red, inflamed eyes, he glared at her more angrily.

"What's the matter with you?" he said, emphasizing the last word like a gibe. "What are ye doin' up at this hour wi' your bleary, baggy een like saucers?"

"Father," she whispered, "ye'll not be angry, will ye?"

"What in God's name are ye snivelling for?" Was this the kind of homecoming that he merited and on such a night as this had been?

"Can ye not be in bed before I come in," he gnashed at her. "I don't have to look at ye there, ye auld trollop. You're a beautiful specimen o' a thing to come hame to, right enough. Did ye expect me to tak' ye out courtin' on this braw, moonlight nicht ? You, that's got as much draw in ye as an auld, cracked pipe."

As she looked upwards into his dark, disgusted face she seemed to shrink more into herself, her substance became less than a shadow, coherent speech failed her, but tremblingly, indistinctly, she articulated one word: "Matt!"

"Matt! Your dear, wee Matt! What's wrong wi' him next?" he fleered at her. "Has he swallowed another plum stane?"

"This letter," she faltered. "It it came for me this mornin'. I've been feared to show you it all day," and, with a shaking hand, she handed him the crushed sheet of paper which she had all day hidden against her terrified, palpitating breast. With a derisive growl he rudely snatched the letter from her fingers and slowly read it, whilst she rocked herself to and fro distractedly, wailing with a tongue which was now loosed in the defence of her son:

"I couldna keep it to myself a minute longer. I had to sit up for ye. Don't be angry wi' him, Father. He doesna mean to vex you, I'm sure. We don't know the facts and it must be a terrible country out there. I knew something must be wrong wi' the boy when he stopped writin' regular. He’ll be better at hame."

He had finished reading the few scrawled lines.

"So your big, braw, successful son is comin' hame to ye," he snarled. "Hame to his loving mother and all her loving care."

"Maybe it's for the best," she whispered. 'Til be glad to have him back and to nurse him back to strength if he needs it."

"I ken you'll be glad to have him back, ye auld fool but I don't give a damn for that." He again considered the crushed sheet with aversion before compressing it into a ball within his shut fist and jerking it furiously into the fireplace.

"What's the reason o' him throwin' up his good job like this?"

"I know no more nor yourself, Father, but I think he must be poorly in himself. His constitution was aye delicate. He wasna really fitted for the tropics."

He showed his teeth at her.

"Fitted, your silly, empty head. 'Twas you made him a milk-and- water softie, with all your sapsy treatment o' him. 'Matt dear,' he mimicked, 'Come to your mother and she'll gie ye a penny. Never mind your father, Iambic dear, come and Mamma will pet ye, dearie.' Is't that what brings him fleein' back to your dirty apron strings? If it is, I'll string them round his neck. P.S. Please tell father," he sneered, quoting the burnt letter. "He hasna even the gumption to write to me himself, the washy, pithless pup. He's got to get his sweet, gentle mother to break the guid news. Oh! he's a right manly whelp."

"Oh! James, would ye no' comfort me a little?" she implored. "I'm that downright wretched. I dinna ken what has happened and the uncertainty is fair killin' me. I'm feared for my bairn."

"Comfort ye, auld wife!" he sang at her. "I would look well, would I not, puttin' my arm around a bag like you?" Then, in a harsh tone of repugnance, he continued, “U I canna thole ye! Ye know that! Ye're as much good to me as an empty jeely jar. Ye're just about as much a success o' a wife as ye are o' a mother. One o' your litter has made a bonnie disgrace o' ye and this one seems to be on his way. Ay, he seems well on his way. He's a credit to your upbringing o' him." Then his eyes darkened suddenly. "Take care, though, ye don't interfere wi' my Nessie. She belongs to me. Don't lay a finger on her. Keep your soft fiddle-faddle away from her or I'll brain ye."

"Ye'll give him a home, Father," she moaned, "Ye'll not show him the door?"

He laughed hatefully at her.

"It would kill me if ye turned him out like like " She broke down completely.

"I'll have to think about it," he replied, in an odious tone, revelling in the thought of keeping her in suspense, diverting against her all his indignant displeasure at Matthew's sudden defection and thrusting the entire blame of this failure of her son upon her. Hating her already in his defeated desire for the pleasure she could not give him, he loathed her the more inordinately because of this failure of her son, and he would, he told himself, let her pay for it dearly, make her the chopping block for the keen blade of his wrath. The fact that Matthew should have given notice and be sailing for home was entirely her offence; invariably the faults of the children made them hers, their virtues his.

"You're too just a man not to hear what he's to say or what he wants, Father," she persisted, in a ridiculous, wheedling voice. "A fine, big man like you wouldna do onything like that. Ye would give him a hearin', let him explain there's bound to be a reason."

"There'll be a reason, right enough," he sneered at her. "He'll want to come and live off his father, I've no doubt, as if we hadna enough to do without feedin' his big, blabby mouth. That'll be the reason o' the grand home-comin'. I've no doubt he thinks he's in for a grand soft time here, wi' me to work for him and you to lick the mud off his boots. Damn it all It's too much for a man to put up wi'." A gust of passion mixed with a cold sleet of antipathy caught him.

"It's too much," he yelled at her again. "Too blasted much."

Raising up his hand as though to menace her with its power, he held it there for one tense moment, then with a sudden gesture he directed it towards the gas, turned out the light and, throwing the effacing darkness around her, went heavily out of the room.

Mrs. Brodie, left in the obliterating blackness, the last dying spark of the cinders of the fire barely silhouetting the amorphous outlines of her contracted figure, sat cowed and still. For a long time she waited, silent and reflective, while her sad thoughts flowed from her like dark waves, oppressing and filling the room with a deeper and more melancholy obscurity. She waited whilst the embers grew cold, until he would be undressed, in bed, and perhaps asleep; then she moved her set, unwilling frame, crept out of the kitchen, like a hunted animal from its cave, and crawled warily upstairs. The boards which had groaned and creaked when Brodie ascended were noiseless under her frail weight, but, though her movements were soundless, a faint sigh of relief emanated from her as, at the door of the bedroom, the heavy sound of her husband's breathing met her. He slept, and, feeling her way into and about the room she shed her shabby, spotted garments; laying them on a heap on her chair, ready for the morning, she crept cautiously into bed, fearfully keeping her wilted body away from his, like a poor weak sheep couching itself beside a sleeping lion.

"MAMMA," said Nessie, on the following Saturday, "what is Matt coming back for?"

She was playing about the house and dragging after her mother in the desultory, querulous manner of a child to whom a wet Saturday morning is the worst evil of the week.

"The climate wasna suitable to him," replied Mrs. Brodie shortly.

It was deeply rooted in the mind of Mamma as an essential tenet of the Brodie doctrine that from the young must be kept all knowledge of the inner workings of the affairs, relationships, and actions of the house, the more so if they were disagreeable. To questions concerning the deeper and more abstract aspects of Brodie conduct and, indeed, of life in general, the consoling answer was, "You'll know some day, dear. All in good time!" And, to divert interrogations, the issue of which could not be avoided, Mamma considered it no sin to lie whitely and speciously to maintain inviolate the pride and dignity of the family.

"There's dreadful fevers out there," she continued; and a vague idea of improving Nessie's natural history made her add, "and lions, tigers, elephants and giraffes, and all manner o' curious beasts and insects."

"But, Mamma!" persisted Nessie. "Jenny Paxton said it was all through the Yard that our Matt had got the sack for not attendin' to his work."

"She told a wicked untruth then. Your brother resigned his position like a gentleman."

"When will he be back, Mamma ? Will he bring me anything, do you think? Will he bring me a monkey and a parrot? I would like a parrot better than a monkey. A monkey would scratch me but a parrot would talk to me and say, 'Pretty Polly', and that's more than a canary can do, isn't it?" She paused meditatively, then resumed,

"No; I'll not have that. I would have to clean its cage. I think I would like a pair of honky-tonky, Morocco slippers or or a bonnie, wee string o' coral beads. Will ye tell him, Mamma?"

"Be quiet, girl! How can I write to him when he's on his way home? Besides, Matt has more to think of than beads for you. You'll see him soon enough."

"Will he be here soon, then?"

"You'll know all in good time, Nessie." Then, voicing her own hopes, she added, "It might be in about ten days, if he left soon after his letter."

"Ten days! That's fine," Nessie chanted, and began to skip about with a more lively air. "I'll maybe have some fun when Matt comes back, forbye the wee string o' beads. It's been terrible since "

She stopped abruptly against the blank, forbidding wall of a subject absolutely interdicted, looked timidly at her mother, paused for a moment in confusion, then, as she saw that she was not to be reprimanded, began again, by a childish association of ideas, "What does it mean to be in deep water, Mamma?"

"What are ye talkin' about now, Nessie. Ye run on like a spoutin' waterfall. Can ye not let me get my work done!"

"One of the girls in the class asked if my father could swim, because she heard her father sayin' that James Brodie was gettin' into deep water."

"Will you stop tormentin' me with your silly nonsense, Nessie," cried Mamma. "Your father can look after himself without your help. It's an impertinence for his name to be lifted like that." Nevertheless, the childish question touched her with a sharp, sudden misgiving, and, as she picked up a duster and went out of the kitchen, she wondered vaguely if there was any intrinsic reason for the

exacerbation of Brodie's meanness with her, for the whittling and paring of her house-keeping allowance which had for months past made it impossible for her to make ends meet.

"Oh! It's not me, Mamma," replied Nessie, narrowing her small mouth virtuously and following her mother into the parlour. "It's what the other girls in the class say. You would think there was something funny about us the way they go on. Ym better than them, amn't I, Mamma? My father could beat all theirs tied together."

"Your father's a man in a million." It cost Mrs. Brodie an effort to say these words, but she uttered them heroically, unconscious of the ambiguous nature of her phrase, striving only to maintain the best traditions of the house. "Ye must never listen to a thing against him. Folks say bitter things when they're jealous o' a man."

"They're just a lot of cheeky, big things. I'm going to tell the teacher if they say another word about us," concluded Nessie, pressing her nose against the window like a small blob of putty. "It's still raining, coming down heavy as heavy hang it!"

"Nessie! Don't say hang it! It's not right. You're not to use bad words," reprimanded Mamma, interrupting her polishing of the brass candlesticks on the walnut front of the piano. She would take no chances with Nessie! The first sign of error must be corrected!

"Remember, now, or I'll tell your father," she threatened, addressing her heated face again towards the piano which, open for the nonce, smiled at her in fatuous agreement, its exposed keys grinning towards her like an enormous set of false teeth.

"I wanted to go out and play that was all," came the plaint from the window, "but there's puddles everywhere, even if it does go off. I've got to work so hard at these old lessons through the week, it's a shame if a girl can't get a little bit of playtime on a Saturday."

Disconsolately, she continued to view the dismal prospect of the wet December landscape, the wet roadway, the rain-drenched fields, the still, dripping branches of the birches opposite, the melancholy lack of movement save for the steady fall of water. But her facile prattle did not cease for long and, despite the depressing scene, in a moment she had recommenced:

"There's a sparrow sittin' on our cannon. Oh! There's another that's two wee sparrows cowriein' down in the rain on our brass cannon. What do we keep a cannon like that for? It doesn't shoot and it always needs cleanin'. I've never noticed how funny it looked till the now. Mamma!" she pestered insistently. "What is it there for? Tell me."

"A kind of ornament to set off the house, I suppose that was your father's idea," came the harassed voice from the back of the piano.

"It would have been better to have had a plot of pansies, or a wee monkey-puzzle tree like Jenny Paxton has in front o' her house," replied Nessie; then, continuing slowly, voicing her idle thoughts aloud, she chattered on: "There's not a breath in these trees across the fields. They're standin' like statues in the rain. 'Rain, rain, go to Spain! Never more come back again!' That'll not put it away, though. That's only a story like Santa Claus. He's got a white beard. What is a Spaniard like, I wonder. Has he a black face ? The capital of Spain is Madrid. Correct. Up to the top of the class, Nessie Brodie. Good for you! That'll please Father. What a day for a Saturday holiday. Here am I doin' geography on it. Not a body on the street. No! I'm wrong, I believe there's a man. He's comin' up the road.

It's not a man, it's a telegraph boy!" It was a rich and unusual discovery in the dull, uninteresting prospect, and she fastened upon it delightedly. "Mamma! Mamma! somebody's going to get a telegram.

I see the boy in the road. He's comin' right up here. Oh! Look, look!" she called out in a rapturous effervescence of expectation and excitement. "He's comin' into our house!"

Mrs. Brodie dropped her duster and flew to the window, through which she saw the boy coming up the steps, and immediately she heard the door-bell peal with such violence that it sounded in her startled ears like a sound of alarm. She stood quite still. She feared telegrams with a dreadful intensity as the harbingers of swift, unexpected calamity; they spoke not to her of happy births or joyous weddings but of the sudden, unconceived disaster of death. As she stood motionless a second, ominous ring of the bell fell upon her ears, and, as though the powerful pull tugged at the cords of her memory, reminded her of that previous solitary occasion in her life when she had received a telegram, the message which had announced the death of her mother. Without looking at Nessie she said, hoarsely,

"Go to the door and see what it is."

Yet when Nessie, bubbling with anticipation, had run out of the room, she sought to calm herself; she reflected that perhaps the messenger had come only to collect information regarding an unknown name or an indecipherable address, as, living in the last house in the road, such inquiries were not infrequently addressed to them.

She strained her hearing to the utmost, essaying to catch some hopeful sounds that might indicate a colloquy at the door, but vainly, for immediately Nessie was back, waving an orange slip with all the triumph of her own personal discovery.

"It's for you, Mamma," she announced breathlessly; "and is there an answer?"

Mamma took the telegram into her hand as though she touched a poisonous viper and, turning it over fearfully, inspected it with the profound horror with which she might have viewed this dangerous reptile. "I can't FZC without my glasses," she murmured, afraid to open the telegram and trying feebly to gain time.

In a flash Nessie had gone and in a flash returned, bearing the steel-rimmed spectacles. "Here you are, Mamma! Now you'll manage to read it. Open it."

Mrs. Brodie slowly put on her glasses, again looked timorously at the dreadful thing in her hand and, turning to Nessie in a panic of indecision and fear, faltered:

"Perhaps I better leave it to your father. It mightna be my place to open a thing like this. It's a job for your father, is't not, dear?"

"Oh, come on, Mamma, open it," urged Nessie impatiently. "It's addressed to you and the boy's waiting for the answer."

Mrs. Brodie opened the envelope with stiff, ungainly fingers, tremblingly extracted the inner slip, unfolded it, and looked at it. For a long time she looked at it, as though it had contained, not nine words, but a message so lengthy and complicated that it passed her comprehension. As she gazed, gradually her face became dead, like grey ashes, and seemed to shrink into a smaller and more scanty compass; her features became pinched and drawn, as though some sudden icy blast had extinguished the feeble glow which animated them and frozen them into a strange, unnatural immobility.

"What is it, Mamma?" asked Nessie, on her tiptoes with curiosity.

"Nothing," repeated Mrs. Brodie in a dull, mechanical voice. She sat down limply upon the sofa with the rustling slip of paper fluttering between her shaking fingers.

Outside in the porch, the waiting boy, who had for some moments been moving impatiently, now began to whistle restlessly and to kick his toes noisily against the step, thus informing them in his own fashion that it was no part of his duty to wait upon this doorstep for the duration of an entire day.

"Do you want the boy to wait for an answer?" continued Nessie curiously, observing but not fully comprehending her mother's strained immobility.

"No answer," automatically replied Mamma.

At Nessie's injunction the telegraph boy departed, still whistling loudly and unconcernedly, recognising his importance as the instrument of destiny, yet totally unmoved by the ravages of his missive of destruction.

Nessic came back to the parlour and, regarding her mother, thought her appearance ever more strange, seemed with a more prolonged scrutiny hardly to recognize her.

"What's the matter with you, Mamma? You look so white." She touched her mother's cheek lightly; felt it, under her warm fingers, to be cold and stiff as clay; then, with an uncanny intuition, she continued:

"Was it something about Matt in the telegram?"

At the name of her son Mrs. Brodie returned from her frigid rigidity into the conscious world. Had she been alone she would have melted into an abandoned flood of tears, but in Nessie's presence her weak spirit made a powerful effort to check the sobs rising in her throat and, struggling for control, she endeavoured to think with all the forces of her benumbed intellect. Urged by the strongest motive in nature to an effort of mind and will which would nominally

have been far beyond her, she turned with a sudden movement to the child.

"Nessie," she breathed, "go up and see what Grandma's doing. Don't mention this wire, but try and find out if she heard the bell. You'll do that for Mamma, won't you, dear?"

With the quick perception that was the basis of her smartness Nessie understood exactly what her mother required of her, and embracing gleefully the task, which was that kind of confidential mission she adored to perform, she nodded her head twice, slowly, understandingly, and strolled casually out of the room.

When her daughter had gone, Mrs. Brodie unrolled the ball into which the telegram had been crumpled within her contracted fingers, and although the message had seared itself upon her memory, unconsciously she gazed at it again, whilst her quivering lips slowly framed each individual word "Wire my forty pounds Poste Restante Marseilles immediately. Matt."

He wanted his money! He wanted the savings that he had sent home to her, the forty pounds that she had invested for him in the Building Society! She saw immediately that he was exiled in Marseilles, in trouble in some desperate strait, and that the money was a vital and immediate necessity to remove him from the meshes of a dreadful and dangerous entanglement. Some one had stolen his purse, he had been sandbagged and robbed, the vessel had sailed and left him stranded, without any of his belongings, in Marseilles. Marseilles the very name unknown, foreign, sinister, chilled her blood and suggested to her every possible evil that might befall her beloved son, for, on the sole evidence of this cryptic and appalling demand, she conceived him to be, definitely, the innocent victim of deplorable and harrowing circumstances. Sifting the available facts to the uttermost, she observed that the wire had been handed in at Marseilles that morning how soon had travelled the unhappy tidings! which indicated to her that he had been in a fit state to dispatch the message, that he should be, at least, in no immediate physical danger. He had recovered, perhaps, from the effects of the vicious assault upon him, and now merely awaited patiently and anxiously the arrival of his own money. As her thoughts ran through these innumerable winding channels of her supposition, they converged inevitably, despite a dozen deviations in their courses, to the one common, relentless termination, to the conclusion that she must send this money. A pitiful shudder shook her at the very thought. She could not send it; she could send nothing. She had spent every penny of his forty pounds.

During the past nine months her financial struggles had been desperate. Brodie had progressively cut her allowance until he had at length reduced it by half, yet he expected the same excellent food supplied, where he was concerned, in the same excessive quantities; and did she manifest the slightest indication of economy upon the table she became the object of a fierce sarcastic tirade, in which he vituperated her as an incompetent bungler who lacked the ability even to manage adequately the petty exchequer of the home. He taunted her with the superior ability of his old mother, producing specious evidence of the old woman's housewifely efficiency, relating in detail the delicious, inexpensive meals she had prepared for him before his marriage, threatening, despite his mother's age, to transfer the management of the house into her more competent hands. It had been useless for Mamma to protest weakly that he gave her insufficient money, that food prices were rising, that the growing Nessie required more clothes, new boots, more expensive school books, that Grandma Brodie would not relinquish one single item of the comforts and luxuries to which custom had habituated her. It would have been equally ineffective, had she attempted it, to convince him that she spent not one farthing upon her own personal expenses, that she had not bought herself a new garment for three years, that in consequence she was the epitome of bedraggled inelegance, exposing herself, by the very unselfishness of this economy, to his gibes and sneers. Seeing her thus, despite a few feeble, ineffective initial protests, accept the reducted amount and apparently manage with it, he concluded that he had been too lavish in the past and, as money was so tight with him that he exulted in the opportunity to economise at her expense, he had tightened his purse strings to the limit and ground her further under the pressure of his heel.

Although she struggled to make one shilling do the work of two by buying in the cheapest markets, by bargaining and wheedling until she had achieved a reputation for mean shrewishness, it could not continue. Bills had become overdue, tradesmen had become impatient and finally, in despair, she had chosen the path of least resistance and drawn upon Matthew's money. Immediately, matters became easier. Brodie's growls about the food became less frequent, the old woman's whining, senile recriminations abated, Nessie had a new coat, the school fees were paid, and the long-suffering butcher and grocer were appeased. She herself obtained nothing, no clothing, no trivial trinket, no indulgence of her fancy, nothing but a transient immunity from the reproaches of her husband and the worries of her debts. She had consoled herself for her action by telling herself that Matt had really meant the money for her, that he loved her so that he would desire her to take it; again, she had reasoned that she had not spent it upon herself, that she would undoubtedly save and collect it for him in better times and fairer financial weather.

Forty pounds! It was a ruinous sum! Although she had expended it so easily, the thought of obtaining it again was incredible. Under her former circumstances, and by the most penurious thrift, she might achieve this amount in, perhaps, the long term of a year; but the sum was required immediately. Her lips quivered as her heart quailed within her, but immediately she rallied herself, bracing herself to be brave for Matt's sake. She set her mouth firmly and looked up as Nessie returned to the room.

"Grandma was tidying up hei drawer," whispered Nessie to her mother, with the air of a conspirator. "She didn't hear the bell and she doesn't know a thing about it. I found out ever so carefully!"

"That's a good, clever girl," said Mamma. "Nobody's to know about that telegram, Nessie. You're not to open your mouth yourself, about it. That was for me and nobody else. I trust you now! And I'll give ye something nice if ye don't tell." Then she concluded vaguely, feeling that some form of explanation was expected of her, "It was just from an old friend in the country an old friend of Mamma's who is in some slight distress."

Nessie placed her left forefinger on her closed lips, delighted to share in a confidence of her mother's, implying by this precocious gesture that she was worthy to be trusted with the most private and mysterious secrets of the universe.

"That's right, now. Don't forget that you've given your word, Your father need know nothing about it," said Mrs. Brodie, as she got up. She desired to remain passively considering the situation, but it was nearly noon, and she had the dinner to prepare. No matter what anxiety affected her, the work of the house must go on, meak must appear upon the table with an inexorable punctuality, the master must be propitiated, fed adequately and succulently. As she began to peel a large potful of potatoes she tried to reach some decision as to what she should do.

At the outset she realised that she would obtain no help from her husband. She would have steeled herself to anything for Matt's sake, but it was an impossibility for her to face her husband and demand a sum of the absurd magnitude of forty pounds, realising with certainty, as she did, beforehand, that he would infallibly refuse to send the money. To bring the matter uselessly, in this manner, to his knowledge would be to reveal to him her own culpability, arouse his prodigious wrath, and yet obtain no tangible result. Even as she reasoned thus, she could visualise him sneering, "He's in Marseilles, is he ? Well, let him walk or swim back. It'll do the poor dear a heap o' good."

She next considered the possibilities associated with Agnes Moir. There was no doubt but that Agnes, who, like Mamma, could refuse him nothing, would be instantly willing to send money to Matthew, despite the shameful coldness and neglect she had suffered from him during the last few months, but it was, unhappily, an equal certainty that she did not possess forty pounds. The Moirs, although respectable, were poor; privation lay very near to their door and it was unthinkable, even if they wished Agnes to have the money, that they could suddenly produce a large sum like this. Additionally, there had been a strong hint of reproach in Miss Moir's attitude to her lately which contained a justifiable suggestion of suffering and injured innocence. How could she then, in the face of such wounded purity of conscience, confess herself the thief of her own idolised son's money. The impeccable Miss Moir would condemn her immediately, would perhaps repudiate her before the eyes of the entire town.

She therefore abandoned Agnes, but whilst she mechanically performed the actions of cooking the dinner her mind continued to work furiously, racing against time. When Brodie came in she served the meal without once removing her fierce concentration from the problem that obsessed her, and with such unusual abstraction that she placed before Brodie, in mistake, Nessie's small plate.

"Are ye drunk, woman?" he roared at her, gazing at the diminutive portion. "Or am I expected to repeat the miracle o' the loaves and fishes?"

As she hastily changed the plates Mamma blushed guiltily at this outward manifestation of her secret cogitations; but how could she have said, in extenuation, "I was thinking of how I could raise forty pounds for Matt?"

''She'll have been takin' a wee sook at the bottle to keep her strength up," tittered Grandma Brodie maliciously. "That's how she'll have been passin' the time this mornin'."

"So that's where the money for the house goes," sneered Brodie, taking up his mother's lead; " in tipple! Well, we maun see what's to be done about that."

"Maybe that's what's gie'n her that red neb and watery een, I'm thinkin'," replied the old woman.

Nessie said nothing, but her too obvious side glances of fealty and cooperation towards Mamma were so pregnant with meaning that they almost defeated their object. Still, the crisis was not precipitated and, after dinner, when Brodie had departed and the old woman retreated upstairs, Mamma breathed more freely, and turning to Nessie, said:

"Will you clear up, dear? I've got to go out for a few messages. You're a great help to Mamma to-day, and if you've got the dishes washed when I come back, I'll bring you a pennyworth of sweeties."

In her awful dilemma she was capable even of subtle strategy in a small matter like this and, although the rain had ceased, Nessie consented willingly, lured by the bait of sweetmeats, charmed to be recognised by her mother as so supremely grown up.

Mrs. Brodie put on a hat and coat, the latter the very paletot she had worn when she escorted Matt to Glasgow on his departure, and hurried out of the house. She quickly crossed the Common and took the road which ran behind the station; then, at the junction of Railway Road and College Street, she paused outside a small, low- browed shop which bore above the crooked lintel of its doorway the disreputable insignia of three brass balls. Upon the window was a notice which stated in dirty white letters, and, through the defection of certain letters and the broken condition of others, with some uncertainty: Gold, Silver, Old False Teeth Bought, Money Lent; whilst behind this, chalked on a small, unprosperous-looking slate, was the terser and less prepossessing phrase: Rags Bought. With a

fearful misgiving Mrs. Brodie contemplated this, the only pawnshop in the respectable Borough of Lcvcnf ord. To enter these precincts was, she knew, the most abysmal humiliation to which a respectable person could descend; and the greater crime of being detected entering therein meant disgrace, dishonour and social annihilation. She realised all this, realised further her inability to cope with the hidden horrors within, yet she compressed her lips and glided bravely into the shop, as quickly and unsubstantially as a shadow. Only the loud, revealing tinkle of the bell attached to the door marked her entry, and surrounded by its mellifluous reiterations she found herself facing a counter in a small box-like compartment which appeared to be one of three. Here the number three had apparently a cabalistic significance both without and within, yet in the compartment she was more private than she could have hoped. Even in this debased society there were apparently instincts of delicacy! When the tinkle of the bell had ceased, her nostrils became gradually and oppressively aware of an odour, emerging permeatingly from some unseen point, of boiling fat tinctured with the aroma of onions. With a sudden faintness at the greasy, nauseating odour, she closed her eyes, and when she opened them a moment later, a short, squat man magically confronted her, having issued unseen, like a genie, from behind the heavy opaque cloud of vapour that filled the inner shop. He had a long, square beard, iron grey and slightly curling, bushy eyebrows of the same colour and texture, beneath which bright, beady eyes twinkled like a bird's; his hands and shoulders moved deferentially, but these black pellets of eyes never left Mrs. Brodie's face. He was a Polish Jew whose settlement in Levenford could be adduced only to his racial proclivity for courting adversity and who, failing to eke out an existence by usury in the hard soil of the Borough, was reduced to merely subsisting so so it seemed by the buying and selling of rags. Being mild and inoffensive, he did not resent the abusive epithets which greeted him as, shouting, "Any rag anybone! any-bottle to-day!", he drove his donkey care upon his rounds; and he made no complaints except to bewail, to such as would hear him, the absence of a synagogue in the town.