She hesitated a minute, flushed, demure: I’d love to. Terribly. Only—I’ve no money. And in a sudden rush of confidence was telling Chris she’d come dead broke from Dundee and wouldn’t get an advance until Wednesday, she’d nothing till then and had settled herself to mope the weekend in Windmill Place. Chris said that didn’t matter, she’d pay, and Miss Johns could pay her back some time; and the pussy-cat was shyer than ever, and Chris asked her name, and she said, Oh, Ellen. Helen really, you know, but when Dad came down from London to work in Dundee I went to High School and they mis-spelt me Ellen…. And Chris had almost expected that, she couldn’t have been anything else but an Ellen!

She was dressed and down in the sitting-room a short minute before Εwan came down. Chris said Ellen Johns—Ewan Tavendale. He’s my son—sometimes. Ellen’s coming out with us on our jaunt. And Ewan, un-boylike, wasn’t shy a bit, he said that would be nice, grey granite eyes on Ellen Johns as though she were a chapter on phosphor bronze, they were much of the same straight height and look, both dark and cool, Ellen cool as he was, no blush now, indifferently polite to each other. And a queer unease came on Chris that minute as she looked from one to the other: as though she were sitting in a theatre-stall and watching the opening of a dark, queer play.

But that fancy was lost in the hours that followed. The three went down to Mercat Cross and found an Aberdeen bus waiting there, ready to leave in a minute or so, crossing the Slug into Banchory, down by Deeside and Dunecht to Aberdeen, turning about and so back again. And they got in the bus, the two pussy-cats polite, not wanting either to sit by the other, manœuvring each to sit by Chris. Chris said I think I’ll sit by myself, right at the front, and went and sat there, the other two on the opposite seat, Ellen by the window, hatless, hair braided, curling long lashes and secret face, Ewan hatless as well, cool and composed, staring about him as the bus moved off. Once he leaned over and asked where they were going, Chris didn’t know, they’d get out at some place they liked.

In a minute, themselves near the only passengers, the bus was climbing Duncairn Rise up to the heights where the men of Montrose had marshalled three hundred years before, suddenly, on a Sunday, over-awing Duncairn and pouring down to a Sabbath of blood. Chris turned in her seat and looked down and saw the white sword gleam of Royal Mile, the haze that lay on the lums of Footforthie, shining boats dipping out to sea in the pelt and shine of the morning tide. And then the road wheeled up and around and paused: there below the Howe of the Mearns, crowned, shod, be-belted in green and gold, silver chains where the Mearns burns wound and spun to the Forthie’s flow, Stonehaven forward, Bervie behind, far off the shimmer where the Grampians rode, the farms gleaming below the bents, haugh on haugh, tumbling green long corn-swaths under the wind. And syne the bus stopped and took on a farmer, thin and mean-looking, he starved his men and ate sowans to his meat, never cuddled his wife except on Sundays and only then if he’d been to kirk. And like a great squat beetle the bus crept on, oh, they were cutting the hay in a park, the smell in the bus, drifting, tingling—Blawearie’s night and days, hush of the beeches in a still July, pastures sleeping around Segget Manse with Robert beside you as you drowsed on the lawn—Robert that you looked at, and he hadn’t a face—