r
turning my back and going off to the Pentlands and letting the work go
hang!"

They were both law-abiding people. They saw the gravity of her case.

"Not that I want the Pentlands. Dear knows I love the place, but I want
something more than those old hills. I want to go somewhere right far
away. The sight of a map makes me sick. And then I hear a band play--not
the pipes, they make me think of Walter Scott's poetry, which I never
could bear, but a band. I feel that if I followed it it would lead me
somewhere that I would like to go. And the posters. There's one at the
Waverley station--Venice. I could tear the thing down. Did you ever go
to Italy, Mr. Philip?"

"No. I go with the girls to Germany every summer."

"My patience!" said Ellen bitterly. "The way the world is! The people
who can afford to go to Italy go to Germany. And I--I'll die if I don't
get away."

"Och, I often feel like this," said Mr. Philip. "I just take a week-end
off at a hydro."

"A hydro!" snorted Ellen. "It's something more like the French
Revolution I'm wanting. Something grand and coloured. Swords, and people
being rescued, and things like that."

"There's nothing going on like that now," he said stolidly, "and we
ought to be thankful for it."

"I know everything's over in Europe," she agreed sadly, "but there's
revolutions in South America. I've read about them in Richard Harding
Davis. Did ever you read him? Mind you, I'm not saying he's an artist,
but the man has force. He makes you long to go."

"A dirty place," said Mr. Philip.

"What does that matter, where there's life? I feel--I feel"--she wrung
her inky brown hands--"as if I should die if something didn't happen at
once: something big, something that would bang out like the one o'clock
gun up at the Castle. And nothing will. Nothing ever will!"

"Och, well," he comforted her, "you're young yet, you know."

"Young!" cried Ellen, and suddenly wept. If this was youth--!

He bent down and played with the fire-irons. It was odd how he didn't
want to go away, although she was in distress. "Some that's been in
South America don't find it to their taste," he said. "The fellow that's
coming to-night wants to sell some property in Rio de Janeiro because he
doesn't mean to go back."

"Ah, how can he do that?" asked Ellen unsteadily. The tears she was too
proud to wipe away made her look like a fierce baby. "Property in Rio de
Janeiro! It's like being related to someone in 'Tre