For the next few days he found himself involved in Eppie’s sleuth-hound pursuit of the transgressing publican, amused, but quite willing,--somewhat, he saw, to her surprise,--to help her in her crusade. Not only did he tramp over the country with her in search of evidence, and expound the Gothenberg system to Sir Alec, to the general, to the rather alarmed quarry himself,--not unwilling to come to terms,--but the application of his extraordinarily practical good-sense to the situation was, she couldn’t help seeing, far more effective than her own not altogether temperate zeal. She was surprised and she was pleased; and at the same time, throughout all the little drama, she had the suspicion that it meant for him what that playing of dolls with her in childhood had meant--mere kindliness, and a selfless disposition to do what was agreeable to anybody. It was on the Saturday following the talk in the library that an incident occurred that made her vision of his passivity flame into something more ambiguous--an incident that gave margins for possibilities in him, for whose bare potentiality she had begun to fear. They were at evening in the gray, bleak village street, and outside one of the public-houses found a small crowd collected, watching, with the apathy of custom, the efforts of Archie MacHendrie’s wife to lead him home. Archie, a large, lurching man, was only slightly drunk, but his head, the massive granite of its Scotch peasant type, had been brutalized by years of hard drinking. It showed, as if the granite were crumbling into earth, sodden depressions and protuberances; his eye was lurid, heavy, yet alert. Mrs. MacHendrie’s face, looking as though scantily molded in tallow as the full glare of the bar-room lights beat upon it, was piteously patient. The group, under the cold evening sky, in the cold, steep street, seemed a little epitome of life’s degradation; the sordid glare of debasing pleasure lit it; the mean monotony of its daily routine surrounded it in the gaunt stone cottages; above it was the blank, hard sky. Gavan saw all the unpleasing picture, placed it, its past, its future, as he and Eppie approached; saw more, too, than degradation: for the wife’s face, in its patience, symbolized humanity’s heroism. Both heroism and degradation were results as necessary as the changes in a chemical demonstration; neither had value: one was a toadstool growth, the other, a flower; this was the fact to him, though the flower touched him and the toadstool made him shrink. “There, there, Archie mon,” Mrs. MacHendrie was pleading, “come awa hame, do.” Archie was declaiming on some wrong he had suffered and threatened to do for an enemy.