half-way down a silent street when they heard behind them flippety-flop, flippety-flop, stealthy and wicked as the human foot may be.  They turned and saw a great black figure, humped but still high, keeping step with them a yard or so behind.  Several times they turned, terrified by that tread, and could make nothing more of it, till the rays of a lamp showed them a tall Chinaman with a flat yellow face and a slimy pigtail drooping with a dreadful waggish school-girlishness over the shoulder of his blue nankin blouse; and long black eyes staring but unshining.  They were between the high blank walls of warehouses closed for the night.  They dared not run.  Flippety-flop, flippety-flop, he came after them, always keeping step.  Leith Walk was a yellow glow a long way off at the end of the street; it clarified into naphtha jets and roaring salesmen and a crowd that slowly flocked up and down the roadway and was channelled now and then by lumbering lighted cars; it became a protecting jostle about them.  Ellen turned and saw the Chinaman’s flat face creased with a grin.  He had been savouring the women’s terror under his tongue, sucking unimaginable sweetness and refreshment from it.  Mrs. Melville was shedding angry tears and likening the Chinese to the Irish—­a people of whom she had a low opinion—­(Mr. Melville had been an Irishman)—­but Ellen felt much sympathy as one might bestow upon some disappointed ogre in a fairy tale for this exiled Boxer who had tried to get a little homely pleasure.  Ellen found it not altogether Grantown’s gain that it was wholly uninhabited by horror, being an honest row of fishers’ cottages set on a road beside the Firth to the west of Leith.  Its wonder was its pier, a granite road driving its rough blocks out into the tumbling seas, the least urban thing in the world, that brought to the mind’s eye men’s bare chests and muscle-knotted arms, round-mouthed sea-chanteys, and great sound bodies caught to a wholesome death in the vicinity of upturned keels and foundered rust-red sails and the engulfing eternal sterilisation of the salt green waves.

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