"Good evening, Mr. James," she said brightly, and went out into the hall letting the door swing to, and pulled on her coat and tam-o'-shanter in the darkness. Now that it did not matter if she cried, she did not feel nearly so much like crying. "That's the way things always are," she snorted, and began to hum the Marseillaise defiantly as she buttoned up her coat. But though she was not seen here, she was not alone. There pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace. Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac words. With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose, that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she remembered the bluish bloom that had been on his chin the first night she ever saw him. At that she brought her clenched fist down on her other palm and sobbed with hate. He had brought all this upon her. And hearing that, Mr. Mactavish James hobbled towards the door, purring endearments. He was better now. That anguished melody of speculation as to Isabella Kingan's heart he had played over again with the _tempo rubato_ and the pressed loud pedal of sentimentality, and it was now no more than agreeably affecting as a Scotch song ... being kind to the wean for the sake of her who was my sweethairt in auld lang syne.... She was so blind with hate of Yaverland that she was not aware of his presence till he bent over her, whinneying in the slow, complacent accents of Scottish sentiment, "Nelly, Nelly, what ails ye, lassie? Nothing's happened! I'll put it all right." "Yes, of course nothing's happened!" she snapped, her hand on the doorknob. "Who said it had?" And then his words, "I'll put it all right," began to torment her. They threatened her that her disgrace was not to end here, that he might talk about it, that the thing might well be with her to her grave, that she had done for herself, that now and forever she had made her life not worth living. "Och, away with it!" she almost screamed. "You've driven me so that I don't know what I'm doing, you and your nasty wee black poodle of a son!" He had to laugh. "Nelly, Nelly, he's as God made him!" "Ye shelve your responsibility!" she said, and breaking immediately into the bitterest tears of this long day of weeping, flung out of the door of this loathed place, to which she remembered with agony as she ran down the stairs she must return to-morrow to earn her living. III