She was thinking of that when the postman chapped, Ma Cleghorn went paiching out to the hall and silence followed till Ma cried up A letter for you, Mrs Robert Colquohoun.

When Chris got down to the hail there she stood, turning the thing this way and that, all but tearing it open and reading, Chris nearly laughed, she was used to Ma. It’s from Segget, Ma said, and Chris said Is’t now? and took the thing and opened it and read, Ma giving a whistle and turning away and dighting with a duster at the grandfather clock, making on she was awful ta’en up with her work. And Chris read the long straggle of sloping letters and was suddenly smelling, green and keen, sawdust, sawn wood—queerly and suddenly homesick for Segget:

We’ve a new lodger coming on the Monday, Ma. A man that I used to know in Segget, Ake Ogilvie the joiner, he’s gotten a job as a foreman up at the Provost’s sawmills.

Chris started awake. The fog had re-thickened, blanketing Duncairn away from her sight as she stood here dreaming like a gowkèd bairn. Her hair felt damp with the pressing mist veils and the weight of the bag on her arm was lead—funny this habit she aye had had of finding some place wherever she bade to which she could climb by her lone for a while and think of the days new-finished and done, like a packman halting hill on hill and staring back at the valleys behind. She minded how above the ploughed lands of Blawearie this habit had grown, long syne, long syne, when she’d lain and dreamed as a quean by the loch in the shadow of the marled Druid Stones, and how above Segget in the ruined Kaimes she had done the same as the wife of Robert. Robert: and Ake Ogilvie was coming from Segget with his long brown face and his rangy stride. How would he take with a place like Duncairn? How had he gotten the job with the Provost?

Autumn coming down there in the fog, down in the days you no more could glimpse than the shrouded roofs of Duncairn at this hour…. And Ewan—what was happening to Ewan? Once so cool and cold, boy-clear, boy-clever, a queer lad you’d thought would never be touched by any wing of the fancies of men, grey granite down to the core—and now?

In the mirror she saw her face, dim in mist, and smiled at it with a kind dispassion. And what to herself?—just the trauchle of time, the old woman she’d believed herself at first in Duncairn—as she still did sometimes at moments of weariness—or that other quean that refused to die, that moved and looked and stole off her thoughts, and dreamed the daftest of old, lost dreams, blithe as though twenty, unkissed and uncuddled?

Well, time she went into those mists of the future. There was ten o’clock chapping from Thomson Tower.

TWO