She was over-old a woman to climb three steep stairs for the sake of two young men’s drought, and I (having always some regard for the frail) took the key from her hand and went, as was common enough with her younger customers, seeking my own liquor up the stair. In those windy flights in the fishing season there is often the close smell of herring-scale, of bow tar and the bark-tan of the fishing nets; but this stair I climbed for the wherewithal was unusually sweet-odoured and clean, because on the first floor was the house of Provost Brown--a Campbell and a Gael, but burdened by accident with a Lowland-sounding cognomen. He had the whole flat to himself--half-a-dozen snug apartments with windows facing the street or the sea as he wanted. I was just at the head of the first flight when out of a door came a girl, and I clean forgot all about the widow’s flask of French brandy. Little more than twelve years syne the Provost’s daughter had been a child at the grammar-school, whose one annoyance in life was that the dominie called her Betsy instead of Betty, her real own name: here she was, in the flat of her father’s house in Inneraora town, a full-grown woman, who gave me check in my stride and set my face flaming. I took in her whole appearance at one glance--a way we have in foreign armies. Between my toe on the last step of the stair and the landing I read the picture: a well-bred woman, from her carriage, the neatness of her apparel, the composure of her pause to let me bye in the narrow passage to the next stair; not very tall (I have ever had a preference for such as come no higher than neck and oxter); very dark brown hair, eyes sparkling, a face rather pale than ruddy, soft skinned, full of a keen nervousness. In this matter of a woman’s eyes--if I may quit the thread of my history--I am a trifle fastidious, and I make bold to say that the finest eyes in the world are those of the Highland girls of Argile--burgh or landward--the best bred and gentlest of them, I mean: There is in them a full and melting friendliness, a mixture to my sometimes notion of poetry and of calm--a memory, as I’ve thought before, of the deep misty glens and their sights and secrets. I have seen more of the warm heart and merriment in a simple Loch Finne girl’s eyes than in all the faces of all the grand dames ever I looked on, Lowland or foreign. What pleased me first and foremost about this girl Betty, daughter of Provost Brown, were her eyes, then, that showed, even in yon dusky passage, a humoursome interest in young Elrigmore in a kilt coming up-stairs swinging on a finger the key of Lucky Fraser’s garret. She hung back doubtfully, though she knew me (I could see) for her old school-fellow and sometime boy-lover, but I saw something of a welcome in the blush at her face, and I gave her no time to chill to me.