nd Mrs. Melville had made a sharp remark like the ping of a
mosquito about the Irish. Sometimes they would walk along a lane by the
beach to Burntisland. There was nothing good about that except the name,
and a queer resemblance to fortifications in the quays, which one felt
might at any moment be manned by dripping mermen at war with the
landfolk. There they would find a lurching, paintless, broad-bowed
ferry, its funnel and metal work damascened by rust; with the streamers
of the sunset high to the north-west, and another tenderer sunset
swimming before their prow, spilling oily trails of lemon and rose and
lilac on waters white with the fading of the meridian skies, they would
sail back to quays that mounted black from troughs of gold.

She thought of it, still smiling; but the required ecstasy, that would
reconcile her to her hopeless life, did not come. She waited for it with
a canny look as she did at home when she held a match to the gas-ring to
see if there was another shilling needed in the slot. The light did not
come. By every evidence of her sense she was in the completest darkness.
But she did not know what coin it was that would turn on the light
again. Before there had been no fee demanded, but just appreciation of
her surroundings, and that she had always had in hand; even to an extent
that made her feel ridiculous to those persons, sufficiently numerous in
Edinburgh, who regarded their own lack of it as a sign of the wealth of
inhibition known as common sense, and hardly at ease on a country walk
with anybody except her mother or her schoolfellow Rachael Wing. She
thought listlessly now of their day-long excited explorations of the
Pentland Hills. Why had that walk on Christmas Eve, two years ago, kept
them happy for a term? They had just walked between the snow that lay
white on the hills and the snow that hung black in the clouds, and had
seen no living creature save the stray albatross that winged from peak
to peak. She thought without more zest of their cycle-rides; though
there had been a certain grim pride in squeezing forty miles a day out
of the cycle which, having been won in a girls' magazine competition,
constantly reminded her of its gratuitous character by a wild
capriciousness. And there were occasions too which had been sanctified
by political passion. There had been one happy morning when Rachael and
she had ridden past Prestonpans, where the fisher-folk sat mending their
nets on the beac