She sighed, paused irresolute a moment with her foot on the stair, one hand at her heart, the other at the fastening of her coat, and looked at me with a face almost tragic in its trouble. I cannot but think she was on the brink of a confidence, but ere it came she changed her mind and dashed up the stair with a tra-la-la of a song meant to indicate her indifference, leaving me a while in her parlour while she changed her dress. She came back to me in a little, attired in a pale primrose-coloured paduasoy, the cuffs and throat embroidered in a pattern of roses and leaves, her hair unpowdered and glossy, wantoning in and out of a neck beyond description. The first thing she did on entrance was odd enough, for it was to stand over me where I lounged on her settee, staring down into my eyes until I felt a monstrous embarrassment. “I am wonderin',” said she, “if ye are the man I tak' ye for.” Her eyes were moist; I saw she had been crying in her toilet room. “I'm just the man you see,” I said, “but for some unco' troubles that are inside me and are not for airing to my friends on a fine day in Dunkerque.” “Perhaps, like the lave of folks, ye dinna ken yoursel',” she went on, speaking with no sprightly humour though in the Scots she was given to fall to in her moments of fun. “All men, Mr. Greig, mean well, but most of them fall short of their own ideals; they're like the women in that, no doubt, but in the men the consequence is more disastrous.” “When I was a girl in a place you know,” she went on even more soberly, “I fancied all men were on the model of honest John Walkinshaw--better within than without. He was stern to austerity, demanding the last particle of duty from his children, and to some he might seem hard, but I have never met the man yet with a kinder heart, a pleasanter mind, a more pious disposition than John Walkin-shaw's. It has taken ten years, and acquaintance with some gentry not of Scotland, to make it plain that all men are not on his model.” “I could fancy not, to judge from his daughter,” I said, blushing at my first compliment that was none the less bold because it was sincere. At that she put on a little mouth and shrugged her shoulders with a shiver that made the snaps in her ears tremble.