He spoke quietly, but the she-ghost read his eyes. She shrank back trembling, stammered something, and hurried away. Not until we entered Our Square, after ten minutes of strained silence, did MacLachan look up from the pavement. “Was there a lassie I spoke to?” he asked vaguely. “What did I say to her?” The Little Red Doctor told him circumstantially. “Personally, I think you're a liar,” he added. “Do ye?” wistfully answered the tailor, slumping upon a bench. “I take it kind of ye that ye do. But I'm no liar. Once and for all I'll tell ye both. Then ye'll know, and we'll bury it. When my Meg left me I began to die--inside. The last thing in me to die was my pride. When that was dead too--or I thought it so--I set out to seek her. I found her. It was just off Sixth Avenue. In the broad o' the afternoon it was, and there she stood bedizened like yon poor hussy that spoke to us. Raddled with paint too; raddled to the eyes. But the eyes had not changed. They looked at me straight and brave and hard. I had meant well by her, however I might find her. God knows I did! But at the sight of her so, my gorge rose. 'What _are_ ye,' says I, 'that ye should come into the light of day wearing shame on yer face?' Her look never wavered--you mind how fearless she always was, dominie--though she must have seen I was near to killing her with my naked hands. 'I'm as you see me. Take me or leave me,' she says. So I left her to go her ways, and I went mine.” There was a long silence. Then the Little Red Doctor deliberately measured off a short inch on MacLachan's forefinger. “You're not _that_ much of a man, Mac,” said he, and flipped the hand from him. “Do you take him home, dominie; I haven't the stomach for any more of him to-night.” With any other than the Little Red Doctor it would have been a lasting quarrel. But the official physician and healer of bodies (and souls at times) to Our Square is too full of other and more important things to find room for resentment. So when, a fortnight later, MacLachan sallied forth to the tune of “The Cork Leg,” and came back raving with pneumonia, it was, of course, the Red One who pulled him through it. And in that period of delirium and truth the wise little physician saw deep into the true MacLachan and realized that a spirit as wistful and craving as a child's was beating itself to death against the bars of the dour Scotch tradition of silence and repression. “He'll kill himself with the drink,” said the Little Red Doctor to me after the tailor was restored to the Home of Fashion. “Though I'll stop him if I can. That's my business. Even so, maybe I'll be wrong. For the man's heart is breaking slowly. I've a notion that my old friend, Death, Our Square might do better with the case than I can.”