The post was a square-built, bandy-legged little man, with a bristle of grizzled hair about his twisted mouth, perpetually cocking up an ill-bred face in the sight of Heaven. Physically and morally he had in him something both of the Scotch terrier and the London sparrow—the shagginess of the one, the cocked eye of the other; the one's snarling temper, the other's assured impudence. In Gourlay's day he had never got by the gateway of the yard, much as he had wanted to come further. Gourlay had an eye for a thing like him. "Damn the gurly brute!" Postie complained once; "when I passed a pleasand remark about the weather the other morning, he just looked at me and blew the reek of his pipe in my face. And that was his only answer!"
Now that Gourlay was gone, however, Postie clattered through the yard every morning, right up to the back door.
"A heap o' correspondence thir mornin's!" he would simper, his greedy little eye trying to glean revelations from the women's faces as they took the letters from his hand.
On the morning after young Gourlay came home for the last time, Postie was pelting along with his quick thudding step near the head of the Square, when whom should he meet but Sandy Toddle, still unwashed and yawning from his bed. It was early, and the streets were empty, except where in the distance the bent figure of an old man was seen hirpling off to his work, first twisting round stiffly to cock his eye right and left at the sky, to forecast the weather for the day.
From the chimneys the fair white spirlies of reek were rising in the pure air. The Gourlays did not seem to be stirring yet; there was no smoke above their roof-tree to show that there was life within.
Postie jerked his thumb across his shoulder at the House with the Green Shutters.
"There'll be chynges there the day," he said, chirruping.
"Wha-at!" Toddle breathed in a hoarse whisper of astonishment, "sequesteration?" and he stared, big-eyed, with his brows arched.
"Something o' that kind," said the post carelessly. "I'm no' weel acquaint wi' the law-wers' lingo."
"Will't be true, think ye?" said Sandy.