"And what yin might that be?" said Mistress Roy. "Mackimmon," said the boy briefly, "he's no in Rankeillor Street ava'." The hand that held the brush went back in act to throw. Now this was, from the point of view of psychological dynamics, a mistake in tactics. A woman should never attempt to throw anything in controversy, least of all a brush. Her stronghold is to advance to the charge with all her natural weapons and vigour. But to throw a brush is to abdicate her providential advantages. And so Mistress Roy found. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and that was the course described by the pound weight on which Cleg Kelly dropped his hand. It sped fair and level from his hand, flung low as he had many a time skimmed stones on Saint Margaret's Loch in the hollow under the Crags. "_Ouch!_" suddenly said Mistress Roy, taken, as she herself said, "in the short of the wind." The hearth-brush with which she had been wont to correct her former message boys fell helplessly to the ground. "Fetch me a toothfu' frae the back o' the door. Oh, ye villain, Cleg Kelly! I'm a' overcome like!" she said. Cleg went to the back of the door where there was a keg with a spigot. He brought his mistress a drink in a little tinnikin. She seemed to have forgotten to be angry, and bent her brows upon him more pleasantly than she had yet done. "I thocht that ye were a religious boy," she said. Cleg stood back a little with Mackimmon's paper still in his hand. "Pund wecht for besom shank is good religion," said the imperfect Christian but excellent message-boy. "Gang and deliver that paper!" Mistress Roy commanded, again looking up. "I want my breakfast," said Cleg, with an air of sullen determination. His mistress looked at him a moment, still sitting with the tinnikin of undutied whisky in her hand, and occasionally taking a sip. Cleg eyed her level-fronted. She gave in all at once. "Tak' the knife and help yoursel'," she said, pointing to a loaf and a piece of yellow cheese. She went into a back room. "Get up, Jock," she said, giving the clothes a jerk over the foot of the bed, and seizing a water can. Her husband rose to his feet on the floor without a word. Thus was business begun in Mistress Roy's paper-shop on the Pleasance. And so that day went on, the first of many. When Celie Tennant asked Cleg how he was getting on, he said, as the manner of his kind is, "Fine!" And no word more could she get out of him. For Cleg was not a boy to complain. His father, Timothy Kelly, was safely in gaol, and that was enough to give Cleg an interest in life. Moreover, he could save some of his three shillings a week to give to Vara Kavannah to help her with the children. He had not as yet taken advantage of the "chance of the drawer" offered by Mr. Roy. But, on the other hand, he had stuck out for three shillings and his keep. Also, as the advertisements which he read every day in the papers said, he meant to see that he got it.