ontrasted them mournfully. So now,
every night, he saw the cosy companions in their Howff, and shivered at
his own isolation. He felt a tugging at his heart to be off and join
them. And his will was so weak that, nine times out of ten, he made no
resistance to the impulse.

He had always a feeling of depression when he must sit down to his
books. It was the start that gravelled him. He would look round his room
and hate it, mutter "Damn it, I must work;" and then, with a heavy sigh,
would seat himself before an outspread volume on the table, tugging the
hair on a puckered forehead. Sometimes the depression left him, when he
buckled to his work; as his mind became occupied with other things the
vision of the Howff was expelled. Usually, however, the stiffness of his
brains made the reading drag heavily, and he rarely attained the
sufficing happiness of a student eager and engrossed. At the end of ten
minutes he would be gaping across the table, and wondering what they
were doing at the Howff. "Will Logan be singing 'Tam Glen'? Or is
Gillespie fiddling Highland tunes, by Jing, with his elbow going it
merrily? Lord! I would like to hear 'Miss Drummond o' Perth' or 'Gray
Daylicht'--they might buck me up a bit. I'll just slip out for ten
minutes, to see what they're doing, and be back directly." He came back
at two in the morning, staggering.

On a bleak spring evening, near the end of February, young Gourlay had
gone to the Howff, to escape the shuddering misery of the streets. It
was that treacherous spring weather which blights. Only two days ago the
air had been sluggish and balmy; now an easterly wind nipped the gray
city, naked and bare. There was light enough, with the lengthening days,
to see plainly the rawness of the world. There were cold yellow gleams
in windows fronting a lonely west. Uncertain little puffs of wind came
swirling round corners, and made dust and pieces of dirty white paper
gyrate on the roads. Prosperous old gentlemen pacing home, rotund in
their buttoned-up coats, had clear drops at the end of their noses.
Sometimes they stopped--their trousers legs flapping behind them--and
trumpeted loudly into red silk handkerchiefs. Young Gourlay had fled the
streets. It was the kind of night that made him cower.

By eight o'clock, however, he was merry with the barley-bree, and making
a butt of himself to amuse the company. He was not quick-witted enough
to banter a comrade readily, nor hardy enough to es