two front windows only one showed a light, and that through a
blind. Tommy sidled round the house in the hope that the small east
window would be more hospitable, and just as he saw that it was
blindless something that had been crouching rose between him and it.

"Let go!" he cried, feeling the Painted Lady's talons in his neck.

"Tommy!" was the answer.

"It's you, Elspeth?"

"Is it you, Tommy?"

"Of course. Whisht!"

"But say it is."

"It is."

"Oh, Tommy, I'm so fleid!"

He drew her farther from the window and told her it had all been a
wicked lie, and she was so glad that she forgot to chide him, but he
denounced himself, and he was better than Elspeth even at that. However,
when he learned what had brought her here he dried his eyes and skulked
to the door again and brought back her belongings, and then she wanted
him to come away at once. But the window fascinated him; he knew he
should never find courage to come here again, and he glided toward it,
signing to Elspeth to accompany him. They were now too near Double Dykes
for speaking to be safe, but he tapped his head as a warning to her to
remove her hat, for a woman's head-gear always reaches a window in front
of its wearer, and he touched his cold iron and passed it to her as if
it were a snuff-mull. Thus fortified, they approached the window
fearfully, holding hands and stepping high, like a couple in a minuet.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PAINTED LADY

It had been the ordinary dwelling room of the unknown poor, the mean
little "end"--ah, no, no, the noblest chamber in the annals of the
Scottish nation. Here on a hard anvil has its character been fashioned
and its history made at rush-lights and its God ever most prominent.
Always within reach of hands which trembled with reverence as they
turned its broad page could be found the Book that is compensation for
all things, and that was never more at home than on bare dressers and
worm-eaten looms. If you were brought up in that place and have
forgotten it, there is no more hope for you.

But though still recalling its past, the kitchen into which Tommy and
Elspeth peered was trying successfully to be something else. The
plate-rack had been a fixture, and the coffin-bed and the wooden bole,
or board in the wall, with its round hole through which you thrust your
hand when you wanted salt, and instead of a real mantelpiece there was a
quaint imitation one painted over the fireplace. There were some pi