'If you are going to stay in Aberdeen, I hope you will allow me to call upon you. I live near Ballater, forty miles away in the country, so you may guess how thankfully I snatch at a chance of seeing a little society.' At the word 'society' Mrs. Ellmer laughed almost hysterically. 'I am afraid you would find solitude livelier than our society,' she said, with a pitiful attempt to be sprightly. 'Well, will you let me try?' 'Really, Mr. Maude, when we are in the country we live in such a very quiet way. Of course it's different when one is in town and has one's own servants; and these Scotch people have no notion of waiting at table or serving things decently.' 'I know, I know,' I broke in eagerly. 'I'm used to all that myself. Why, I live in a tumble-down old house with a monkey and a soldier for my household, so you may judge that I have got used to the discomforts of the North.' I saw Babiole stealthily shake her mother's arm, and move her lips in a faint 'Yes, yes,'. Reluctantly, and with more excuses for having let the agent-in-advance take lodgings for them which they would not have looked at had they known what a low neighbourhood they were in, Mrs. Ellmer at last consented that I should call and take tea with them next day. I went back to my hotel and engaged a room for the night. The poor woman's sunken face haunted me even in my sleep; and I grew nervous when half-past four came, lest I should hear on arriving at the bare and dirty-looking stone house which I had already taken care to find out, that she was dead. However, my fears had run away with me. On my knocking at the door of the top flat of the little house, Babiole opened it, pretty and smiling, in a simple dress of some sort of brown stuff, with lace and a red necklace round her fair slim throat. She had not seen my face before by daylight; and I saw, by the flash of horror that passed quickly over her features and was gone, how much the sight shocked her. 'I was afraid you would forget to come, perhaps,' she said, in the prim little way I remembered, as she led the way into a small room, in which no one less used to the shifts of travel than I was could have detected the ingenious artifices by which a washhand-stand became a sideboard, and a wardrobe a book-case. The popular Scotch plan of sleeping in a cupboard disposed of the bed.