anywhere for a
good sunset!"

There was that other time that she had been so happy, when they had
watched the fish-wives of Dunbar sitting on tubs under great flaring
torches set in sconces on the wall behind them, gutting herrings that
slid silver under their quick knives and left blood on their fingers
that shone like a fluid jewel, raw-coloured to suit its wearers'
weathered rawness, and lay on the cobbles as a rich dark tesselation.
The reflected sunset had lain within the high walls of the harbour as in
a coffin, its fires made peaceful by being caught on oily waters, and
above the tall roof-trees of the huddled houses behind the stars had
winked like cold, clever eyes of the night. Mrs. Melville had circled
about the scene, crying out at all its momentary shifts from key to key
of beauty, murmuring that the supper would be spoiling and the landlady
awful annoyed, but she must wait, she must wait. When the women had
stopped gutting and had arisen, shaking a largesse of silver scales from
their canvas aprons, and the dying torches had split and guttered and
fallen from the sconces and been trodden out under the top-boots of
bearded men, she had gone home with Ellen like a reveller conducted by a
sober friend, exclaiming every now and then with a fearful joy in her
own naughtiness, "It's nearly nine, but it's been worth it!"

For this innocent passion for beauty the poor little thing (Ellen
remembered how lightly her mother had weighed on her arm that night,
though she was tired) had made many sacrifices. To see better the green
glass of the unbroken wave and hear the kiss the spray gives the sea on
its return she would sit in the bow of the steamer, though that did not
suit her natural timidity; and if passengers were landed at a village
that lay well on the shore she would go ashore, even if there were no
pier and she had to go in a small boat, though these made her squeal
with fright. And there was an absolute purity about this passion. It was
untainted by greed. She loved most of all that unpossessable thing, the
way the world looks under the weather; and on the possessable things of
beauty that had lain under her eyes, in the jewellers' windows in
Princes Street or on the walls of the National Gallery, she had gazed
with no feelings but the most generous, acclaiming response to their
quality and gratitude for the kindness on the part of the powers that
be. She had been a good child: she hadn't snatched.

But