just to see people's faces doing something else
than express resentment at the east wind, to hear them say something
else than "Twopence" to the tram-conductor. Perhaps if one once got
people going there might happen an adventure which, even if one had no
part in it, would be a spectacle. It was seventeen years since she had
first taken up her seat in the world's hall (and it was none too
comfortable a seat), but there was still no sign of the concert
beginning.

"Yet, Lord, I've a lot to be thankful for!" breathed Ellen. She had this
rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere
congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did
the girl no credit. It kept her happy even now, when from time to time
she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the thin joy
of the twilight.

Really the world was very beautiful. She fell to thinking of those
Saturdays that she and her mother, in the days when she was still at
school, had spent on the Firth of Forth. Very often, after Mrs. Melville
had done her shopping and Ellen had made the beds, they packed a basket
with apples and sandwiches (for dinner out was a terrible price) and
they took the tram down the south spurs to Leith or Grantown to find a
steamer. Each port was the dwelling-place of romance. Leith was a
squalid pack of black streets that debouched on a high brick wall
delightfully surmounted by mast-tops, and from every door there flashed
the cutlass gleam of the splendid sinister. Number 2, Sievering Street,
was an opium den. It was a corner house with Nottingham lace curtains
and a massive brown door that was always closed. You never would have
known it, but that was what it was. And once Ellen and her mother had
come back late and were taking a short cut through the alleys to the
terminus of the Edinburgh trams (one saved twopence by not taking the
Leith trams and had a sense of recovering the cost of the expedition),
and were half-way down a silent street when they heard behind them
flippety-flop, flippety-flop, stealthy and wicked as the human foot may
be. They turned and saw a great black figure, humped but still high,
keeping step with them a yard or so behind. Several times they turned,
terrified by that tread, and could make nothing more of it, till the
rays of a lamp showed them a tall Chinaman with a flat yellow face and a
slimy pigtail drooping with a dreadful waggish school-girlishness over
the shou