So they began making plans for the future, they’d get married some time when Ewan had a salary, Ellen would be forced to leave her school. She asked how much of a salary he’d get and he said indifferently Perhaps four pounds, and she said But I get as much as that now—Goodness, we’d have to stay in the Cowgate!

He said nothing to that, she thought she had hurt him and was kind to him a little while, playing a child’s game with him under the patter of the night-blinded trees, kissing him with eyelids against his cheek, butterfly kisses, rather fun. Abruptly he pushed her away, cool and quick: Don’t fool, Ellen, in his old-time voice, hard, the voice of the student Ewan that she hadn’t heard since New Year’s Eve.

She knew he was being only sensible, pity rather, and said she was sorry, and they didn’t stand over-close after that, the weight of the rain was seeping through the branches and now a great low gust of wind swept up the park, driving the soft ground-spray in their faces. Ewan began to talk of the strike, he said that Selden and Trease and himself had already a good strike fund in hand though the Union had been trying to force the men back. Ellen said it was rather a pity to have to work so closely with the Communist leaders, they’d a horrible reputation, both of them liars and not to be trusted; and Ewan said perhaps, he didn’t know, anyhow their tactic of rioting for rioting’s sake was pure insanity, it got nowhere, if a revolution were properly organized it should be possible for a rising class to take power with little or no violence. But Trease and Selden were handy in the strike, stiffening it up. And laughed: Anyhow, whoever goes back, I shan’t. The manager made that plain enough. Doesn’t sound bright for our marriage, does it? You should have left me alone that day on the Barmekin and I might have been good and respectable now, not mixing up with this mess of a strike, but a gent in a bowler, smoking cigarettes in spats.

She said if he was sorry he’d mixed up with Socialism he need never mix up with her, either, then…. And flushed dark in the darkness, but he hadn’t tumbled, innocent as a babe, nice babe. He sat down against the bole of the tree and patted the dry ground there, and caught her ankle in a gentle hand: Sit by me a minute before we go back. You never know what’ll happen to a striker tomorrow!

As the dozen bobbies cleared the way for the scabs coming out of the Works, the dark was falling, there came a hell and pelt of a rush, you were all of you in it, young chaps and old, one bobby struck at you with his truncheon, missed, you were past him, slosh in the kisser the scab; and all about you, milling in the dark, the chaps broke in and hell broke out, the bobbies hitting about like mad, tootling on their whistles, scrunch their damned sticks.