ject justice, with my best
eloquence snatched at random from notebooks. Mrs. James would keep
interrupting with quotations from "the doctor's" famous unfinished MSS.
I would almost have preferred the silent Vedder as a chaperon. But there
was some comfort in the certainty that Somerled was envying me the place
to which I'd been appointed by himself. As he was driving through
traffic, and couldn't glance round, he was unable to see how Barrie's
eyes wandered from the points I indicated to others which she selected
for herself.

My dramatic announcement, that where now rises the solid gray mass of
old Edinburgh once crouched the wattled houses of the first inhabitants,
scarcely caught her attention. She would gaze dreamily at Arthur's Seat,
because Mrs. James had just unfolded a meretricious legend to the effect
that King Arthur used to sit there and watch his troops. And the dark
crag of the Castle, with its thousand years of history, its crowning
walls and towers, its chasms of purple shadow, riveted her fancy when I
would have discoursed on the modern charm of Princes Street--that "half
a street" so much more splendid than any whole street ever planned.

"The doctor told me, I remember," said Mrs. James, "that at the end of
the eighteenth century, when they wanted to build the new Edinburgh,
they had to bribe people by giving them large tracts of land in order to
make them move out of the old town, or they wouldn't budge. Sometimes a
quarter of what they presented to one man in those days is worth a
hundred thousand pounds now."

In spite of the girl's excited admiration of the goddess-town, her first
question on getting out of the car was to Somerled about her mother. "I
think, if she stops at a hotel, she's likely to choose this one," he
said. "That's why I've brought you here."

"Thank you," she answered. "Thank you for everything." Then it was my
turn to envy him.

She was pale, her face drained of colour, and extraordinarily spiritual
as she stood in the big hall, waiting to hear what Somerled would be
told at the desk. He came back soon, and announced that Mrs. Ballantree
MacDonald had engaged a suite at this hotel, but it was not known
whether she would arrive that night or on Monday morning.

"Meanwhile, I've taken a room for you adjoining Mrs. James, as usual,"
Somerled said. "When your mother arrives and you have met, she can make
any new arrangement for you she chooses."

"And you--will go on--with t