were less like paws than they had ever been before, because she was holding them with consciousness of her fingers’ extreme length, took the skirt of her frock and pulled it into panniers.  She wished that she were clad in silk!  But that lent no wistfulness to her face, which now glittered with a solemn and joyful rapacity, for her unconscious being had divined that there were before her many victories to be gained wholly without sweat of the will.  “Ah!” she sighed, and wondered at her over-contentment; and then went on with her delicate shrill chatter, glowing and holding herself with a fine frivolity that made it seem almost as if she were clad in silk, and passing from flowerlike loveliness to loveliness.

“It’s a pity Mr. Yaverland cannot see you now,” said the old man, half from honest jocosity and half from an itch to bring the creature back to this interesting suffering of hers.

Gasping with laughter, though she kept her eyes gravely and steadily on her beauty, she answered, “Yes, it is a pity!  It is a great pity!  He’s very handsome too, you know.  We’d make a bonny pair!  Oh dear, oh dear!”

Mr. James sat up.  “What’s that?  What is it you’re saying?  Hec, you’re talking of making a pair, are you?” Amusement always made his voice sound gross.  “Has he asked you to marry him then, ye shy wee besom?”

She swung round on her toes, her face magic with passion and mischief.  “Give me time, Mr. James, give me time!” she cried, and her head fell back on her long white throat, while her laughter jetted in shaking, shy, thin gusts like a blackbird’s song.  And then she ceased.  Her head fell forward.  Her gown dropped from her outstretched hands, which she pressed against her bosom.  A second past she had filled with spring this office damp with autumn; now she made it more asperous and grey than had November, for her season had changed to the extremest winter.  She pressed her hands so hard against her breast and in a voice weak as if she were very cold she said, “Oh, God!  Oh, God!”

“Eh!” gaped Mr. James.

She had made a fool of herself.  She had said dreadful things.  She had boasted about something that could not come true, that would be horrible if it did.  Her face became chalk white with such agony as only the young can feel.

Mr. James’s gouty leg crackled out pains as he tried to rise, and he had to sink back in his chair and look up at her through the vibrating silence, whispering, “Nelly, my dear lass.”

At that she shot at him such a cold sidelong glance as one might shoot at a stranger who has let one know that he has overheard an intimacy, and with movements at once clumsy and precise she got down from her chair and put it back at the table.  She stood quite still, with her hands resting on it, her face assuming a mean and shrewish expression.  She was remembering a woman who had been rude to her mother, a schoolfellow of Mrs. Melville’s, who had married as well as