’She is your own blood,’ he would say of his partner’s relative, ’you cannot put her on the street.’ Or, ’It is but a sup of porridge the bairns will be wanting just now, not much, a flea’s bite,’ and so forth, and Herries would fume in vain. The old lawyer’s private opinion of Mrs. Maclehose was none the less of an extremely unflattering character; he believed her to be a daughter of the horse leech, who doubtless preyed upon his friend after the manner of her kind, and the sound of her voice in the passage sent shivers down his back, for he was a woman-hater, or something very like it. But she was yet, in his mind, the one tie that Herries had, binding him to the world of kinship, of human interests and human affection. And so the man, whose own heart had perished of atrophy within him, strove to keep life in the heart of the other by the one means that naturally offered itself. Herries, failing thus, as usual, to rouse his partner’s sympathy on the score of the Maclehose difficulty, rose to go, and by a chance movement of some papers on Creighton’s table, he disclosed to view the guilty little brown book hidden under them. His finely-drawn eyebrows arched themselves in a kind of contemptuous query. ’At it again?’ he said, ’that jingle that the town rings with? Your poet’s star is in the descendent now, though, Creighton,’ he added. ’Never, sir!’ said Creighton, hardily. ’That star will never set! It shines to all time,—like Shakespeare’s, like Homer’s, for the matter of that. You’ll not put me out of conceit of my poet, sir!’ ’Deuce take him!’ said Herries, half carelessly, half in earnest. ’My ears are sick of his name. We are like to hear less of it this winter, though, I think; the creature palls at last. How the women fawned upon him last year. Pah!’ ’Women will fawn on anything—a dog, a dwarf, a china monster,’ said Creighton; ’but neither their fawning nor their neglect will touch the fame, the genius of Robert Burns!’ He spoke with heat, and his dull eye kindled. Herries looked at him with a mild wonder. ’It passes me,’ he said, ’this mad enthusiasm for a rhymer—of dirty rhymes, too, for the most part. To me they reek of the midden and the yard, and neither they nor their author are fit furniture for drawing-rooms—that’s my contention. But there, sir, good-night! I leave you to your poet. By the way,’ he added, ’this reminds me that I saw Master Bard on my way home to-night, at his old tricks. But it is not duchesses and fine ladies are his game now, but his own kind, it would seem.’ ’God send him back to the fields and the hills!’ ejaculated Creighton, with warmth. ’The town is no place for poor Rob, and I doubt they have ruined the lad between them all! But I must be gone, too, sir. Dick has been waiting on me this hour and more in the cold.’