“Oh! But I feel sure there must be a train before then,” she urged, as if by sheer hopefulness she could belie the time-tables. “Let me see the board.” And she began a cumbered descent from the cab.

For a woman of but forty-two, even allowing for the fact that at this time she was some months gone with child, Juley moved heavily. Not even the loss of a night’s rest could rob her face of its girlish freshness, but this very youthfulness and ardour of expression served to emphasize her physical ineptitude. It was as if she had never grown used to her body. Often enough had her children heard her sigh impatiently for wings.

Yet Joanna, her younger daughter, looking on, could not believe that swiftness and grace were not mere matters of goodwill, and that therefore this clumsiness was deliberate. “Why will mother move like that?” she questioned in childish vexation. And driven by a strong craving, she stared away from the imperfection facing her, and set her eyes instead on a patch of the blue, perfect sky of May which had shone out suddenly between showers above the house-tops.

“The man must know about the trains, Mother,” Georgie scolded, and turning to the porter she asked him when the twelve o’clock train reached Edinburgh.

“But Aunt Georgina’s lunch is at one!” declared the elder boy, Linnet, when he had heard the reply; and spinning on his heel he seemed to find a zest in adding to the family misfortunes. “Aunt Georgina will be cross! And what about the carriage? It’ll be waiting at the station for us.”

At this a disconsolate exclamation came from Sholto, the youngest. Sholto did so love to sit by Mackintosh, his Aunt’s coachman whose fur cape smelt of naphtha, as they drove along Princes Street.

Georgie glared murderously at her mother.

“It’s all because Father isn’t here,” she repeated.

But the time-table had showed a train that would leave the Central Station in half-an-hour. So the luggage was put back on the railed top of the cab, and the children crowded into it for the five minutes drive. Their last difficulty lay in getting their mother to break off a conversation with the porter. She had discovered that as a lad he had attended her husband’s Bible Class for Foundry Boys: and now she was telling him about the Evangelistic tour Mr. Bannerman was making in the United States of America. She had to be pushed and pulled, protesting, into the cab. Then some one remembered that a telegram must be sent to Aunt Georgina. But at last they were set out on their way again, and they were soon arranging themselves in the train.

II