How she hated the splatter of the driving rain!

*

As that rain held on and pelted Duncairn with the closing in of the storm-driven clouds, great cumulus shapes that came wheeling down from the heights of the far brown lour of the Mounth, the roof-tops glistered in the lights of the Mile and far and near the gutters gurgled, eddied and swam, piercing down to a thousand drains, down through the latest Council diggings, down to dark spaces and forgotten pools, in one place out through an antique tunnel that the first Pict settlers had made and lined with uncalsayed stones, set deep in earth, more than two thousand years before. And far and near as the evening came under the stour a thousand waters by gutters and wynd and the swollen Forthie, dark, brimming, wheeled down through the darkling night to seek the splurge and plunge of the sea pelting beyond the dunes of the beach. Ellen heard its cry long ere they reached it, harsh, soft, the patter of the rain on the waves.

Then Ewan and she had climbed through the Links and up the railings to the desolate front, wet-shining, with hardly the glimmer of a light. Here the rain caught their faces in swaths, warm rain, like corn felled in a reaper’s bout, some Reaper high in the scudding lift. Ewan said There’s a shelter further along. Let’s run for it, and caught her hand and they ran together, both hatless, both wet, and gained its lithe and sat on the bench, panting, staring out at the dark.

Ellen closed her eyes and leaned back her head and stretched out her nice legs, she knew they were nice, and lovely and tingly, and put her hands up behind her wet hair. That run was fun, hard to believe that this was Duncairn, here in the darkness with the forgotten sea.

She peeped at Ewan, sitting near, queer Scotch boy, solemn and not, wonder if he’s ever kissed a girl? And she thought not likely and was angry with herself behaving just like an idiot shop-girl. She’d been tired and drowsy tonight with that long, stuffy meeting of the League, Semple had come and talked for the Reds, she’d thought him a catty and smelly bore. So when it finished and they came out into the rain flooding the Crossgate she’d said to Ewan Let’s go a walk before we go home, half-expecting he’d snub her, he could do that easily. But instead he’d said Yes, if you like, where’ll we go? and she’d said The Beach and he’d said Right-o, not thinking her silly as any other would, Duncairn had stopped going down to the Beach now that Snellie Guff and his Funny Scotch Band had finished their season assassinating music. So down through the squelching Links they’d come and here they were, and there, a creaming unquiet, the sea.

And Ewan said suddenly out of the darkness This would be a splendid night for a bathe.