Her quivering lips said gallantly to the banged door:  “Well, there is my wurrk.  I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as men do!” And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always gave to one of the male clerks to copy.  But that was all the work she had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her.  She was obliged to sit in her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery, which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting any further or changing into anything else.  Presently she went and knelt in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a lens of tears.  She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the client who had told on her.  Surely she had as much right in Princes Street as he had?  And if it was too late for her to be there, then it was too late for him also.  “It’s just a case of one law for the man and another for the woman.  Och, votes for women!” she cried savagely, and flogged the window with the blindcord.  Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve, the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and tee-heed that “a lawyer’s office must be a dull place for a young leddy like you!” Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for his dealings with his wife’s money....

But the peppered phrases would not come.  One cannot do more than one thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently.  “Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I spent at Oban,” she thought into her sodden handkerchief.  “It was a shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months to pay for the trip.  But life is like that....”  Ah, what did they think she had been doing with that man Yaverland?  The shocked dipping undertones of Mr. Philip’s voice, the ashamed heat of his eyes, were just the same as grown-up people used when they told mother why they had had to turn the maid away, and that, so far as she could make out, though they always spoke softly so that she could not hear, was because the maid had let somebody kiss her.  What was the use of having been a quiet decent girl all her days, of never stopping when students spoke to her, of never wearing emerald green, though the colour went fine with her hair, when people were ready to believe this awful thing of her?  They must