Then the other man, the great one in the public eye, he who paid me--put
in this and that sonorous phrase, full of echoing emptiness, launched an
antithesis which had done good service a time or two on the hustings or
in the House of Commons, and--signed the article. Well, I do not object.
That was what I was there for, and after all I made myself necessary to
the _Universal Review_. It would never have appeared in time but for me.
I verified quotations, continued articles that were too short by
half-a-dozen pages, found statistics where there were blanks in the
manuscript, invented them if I could not find them, generally bullied
the printers and proof-readers, saw to the cover, and never let go till
the "Purple-and-Green," as we were called, was for sale on all the
counters and speeding over Britain in every postboy's leathers.

Now one of my employers (the best) lived away among the woods above
Corstorphine and another out at the Sciennes--so between them I had
pretty long tramps--not much in the summer time when nights hardly
existed, but the mischief and all when for weeks the sun was an
unrealized dream, and even the daylight only peered in for a morning
call and then disappeared.

But at the time of which I write the days were lengthening rapidly. I
was deep in our spring number of the _Universal_. Only the medical
students were staying on at the University, and the Secretary's spacious
office could safely be littered with all sort of printing _debris_. My
good time was beginning.

Well, in one of my walks out to Corstorphine, I was aware, not for the
first time, of the figure of a girl, carefully veiled, that at my
approach--we were always meeting one another--slipped aside into a
close. I thought nothing of this for the first two or three times. But
the fourth, I conceived there was something more in it than met the eye.
So I made a detour, and, near by the end of George Street--unfinished at
that time like all the other streets in that new neighbourhood--I met my
vanishing lady face to face as she emerged upon the Queensferry Road.
She had lifted her veil a little in order the better to pick her way
among the building and other materials scattered there.

It was Irma--Irma Maitland herself, grown into a woman, her eyes
brighter, her cheeks paler, the same Irma though different--with a
little startled look certainly, but now not proud any more, and--looking
every day of her twenty-two years.

"Irma!" I gas