And then Alison realised, with a very strange feeling of aloofness from her friend, and a peculiar sense of the unnaturalness of the situation, that she could never—no, not imaginably ever, she thought—speak to Nancy of her love, and of her lover, Herries! So that wondrous day ended for Alison, and she was alone at last, with no tangible memento of it, saving, indeed, a large cold potato in her muff. A certain intangible memento, it is true, burned upon her cheek, so that she was glad to bury it in the cool sheets. One never knows how long it may be since a reader was in love, and so it were better, perhaps, not to tell how a silly girl, that night, went to bed with a cold potato under her pillow. It might be so very long ago—that silly season with the reader—that he may well have forgotten that, though the sense of humour is a mighty great thing, there is a time with us all when it is nought. *CHAPTER XXVII.* Ordinary mortals, from the schoolboy upward, are familiar with the disagreeableness of what may be called the Monday mornings of life—those after-holiday mornings which come as a cold _douche_ after a pleasant outing. Herries tasted the full amenities of this experience on first buckling to his work after the excursion to Prestonpans. On Sunday—a _dies non_ in the Edinburgh of those days, when most decent persons went to church and stayed there—nothing could be done. On Monday morning he descended to his office in his grimmest business mood, very unlike a young man who had kissed a girl under the lantern in the General’s Entry, late on Saturday evening. Indeed, anyone less like kissing, or being kissed, never was seen. He found a disagreeable accumulation of business; and a certain fact that had lately, from time to time, been hinting its existence—the fact, namely, that his partner’s working capacities were on the wane—was this morning, for the first time, fully borne in upon his mind. In regard to the rather important affairs of a client, there was confusion, and, in respect to the preparation of certain deeds and papers, delay; neither, a few weeks ago, would have been possible, under Creighton’s inexorable _régime_. Herries felt that probably he must shortly face—of all things the most worrying to a business-man, whose affairs have long run in a smooth, appointed groove—a change of partnership. It was the more difficult as Creighton gave no hint of his retirement, and the idea that such a hint might have to originate with his partner, was exceedingly repugnant to the younger man. Herries was aware that his associate’s health was very delicate, but like all those in daily contact with a failing man, he had no idea how great and how rapid was the decline. It certainly never struck him that Creighton omitted to speak of his retirement from business, simply because he believed the last retirement of all to be imminent, and death about to set his partner free.