ping of a mosquito about the Irish.  Sometimes they would walk along a lane by the beach to Burntisland.  There was nothing good about that except the name, and a queer resemblance to fortifications in the quays, which one felt might at any moment be manned by dripping mermen at war with the landfolk.  There they would find a lurching, paintless, broad-bowed ferry, its funnel and metal work damascened by rust; with the streamers of the sunset high to the north-west, and another tenderer sunset swimming before their prow, spilling oily trails of lemon and rose and lilac on waters white with the fading of the meridian skies, they would sail back to quays that mounted black from troughs of gold.

She thought of it, still smiling; but the required ecstasy, that would reconcile her to her hopeless life, did not come.  She waited for it with a canny look as she did at home when she held a match to the gas-ring to see if there was another shilling needed in the slot.  The light did not come.  By every evidence of her sense she was in the completest darkness.  But she did not know what coin it was that would turn on the light again.  Before there had been no fee demanded, but just appreciation of her surroundings, and that she had always had in hand; even to an extent that made her feel ridiculous to those persons, sufficiently numerous in Edinburgh, who regarded their own lack of it as a sign of the wealth of inhibition known as common sense, and hardly at ease on a country walk with anybody except her mother or her schoolfellow Rachael Wing.  She thought listlessly now of their day-long excited explorations of the Pentland Hills.  Why had that walk on Christmas Eve, two years ago, kept them happy for a term?  They had just walked between the snow that lay white on the hills and the snow that hung black in the clouds, and had seen no living creature save the stray albatross that winged from peak to peak.  She thought without more zest of their cycle-rides; though there had been a certain grim pride in squeezing forty miles a day out of the cycle which, having been won in a girls’ magazine competition, constantly reminded her of its gratuitous character by a wild capriciousness.  And there were occasions too which had been sanctified by political passion.  There had been one happy morning when Rachael and she had ridden past Prestonpans, where the fisher-folk sat mending their nets on the beach, and they had eaten their lunch among the wild rose thickets that tumbled down from the road to the sea.  Rachael had raised it all to something on a much higher level than an outing by munching vegetarian sandwiches and talking subversively, for she too was a Suffragette and a Socialist, at the great nine-foot wall round Lord Wemyss’s estate, by which they were to cycle for some miles.  She pointed out how its perfect taste and avoidance of red brick and its hoggish swallowing of tracts of pleasant land symbolised the specious charm and the thieving greed