“It is not the way in my house,” he said, with a certain severity, not liking that little scoff at the Scotch way, though he had brought it on himself. Rowland had no objection to have his fling at his fellow-Scot when occasion served. He had vituperated the Glasgow tradesman largely for being slow, for being behind the time. He had thought everything “provincial”--the hardest word to be applied to such a huge and important place; but he felt offended when any one else followed his example. Evelyn had begun to know the look in his face. That afternoon when they had completed all their last _emplettes_, chosen everything, ordered everything they wanted, and were seated together over the little tea-table which has once more become, though under changed circumstances from those of the eighteenth century, one of the confidential centres of life in England, a visitor appeared who disturbed their talk, and gave to the astonished Rowland another new sensation. He was tired with much movement, declaring that London fatigued him more than the hottest of the plains, and that the shops made a greater call on his energies than any railway or canal he had ever had to do with; and the rest and comparative coolness of the room was pleasant to them both, the beginning of the day having been unlucky, and a disagreeable turn given, as sometimes happens, to all its occurrences. There is something in luck after all, and perhaps the primitive people who turn back from the day’s adventure at sea and labour on land, because they have met an ill-omened passenger--an evil eye--have more reason in their superstition than is generally supposed. That morning’s encounter with the invalid in his chair had been bad for the Rowlands. They had found nothing they wanted. The persons they desired to see had been out of the way. The commissions they had given were not executed to their mind. Everybody knows that sometimes, without any apparent cause, this will be the case to the trial of one’s temper and the confusion of all one’s arrangements. Some one else had snapped up the picture which they had selected at the picture-dealer’s. There had been nothing successful that they had done that day. Rowland, of course, was too enlightened and modern to think of anything like an evil eye. But Evelyn was old-fashioned, and not without a touch of natural and womanish superstition. She set it down to the score of Saumarez and that meeting which she had wished so much to avoid; and the thought oppressed her more than the contrarieties of the day. “It was all our unlucky meeting with that man,” she even went so far as to say, when she came in, jaded and disappointed, feeling the unsuccessful day all the more that everything hitherto had been so very much the reverse. “Do you think he threw a spell upon us?” Rowland said with a laugh. “He doesn’t look at all unlike an old magician, to say the truth.” Evelyn’s little outburst of temper somehow soothed her husband. And though he grumbled a