A few shops lay open, throwing faint radiance on the footpath that swam in water.
Miss Mary went to the window of two sisters who made caps on the Lady Charlotte model and mantuas inspired by a visit to Edinburgh five years ago. She scanned the contents of the window carefully.
“It’s gone; I knew it would be gone,” she said in a whisper to Gilian, withdrawing hastily from the revelation of the window as a footstep sounded a little way down the street.
He awaited her explanation, not greatly interested, for the blank expanse of the moaning sea round the corner of a tall tenement filled him with new and moving emotions.
“There has been a cap there for a week with lilac trimmings for Rixa’s sister, and now it has gone. It was there this morning, and I saw her lassie going by with a bandbox in the middle of the day. That’s two pair at least for the Sheriff’s party.”
“Would it not be easier to-morrow to ask some one who were all there?” said Gilian.
She shook his arm with startled affright.
“Ask! ask!” she exclaimed. “If you dared let on to any one we even heard there was a party, I would—I would—be terribly vexed. No, Gilian, we must hold our heads a bit higher than that.”
She passed with the boy from tenement to tenement.
“Major Hall and his sister are there,” she said, showing darkened windows. “And the Camerons and the Frasers,” she added later, informed by the same signs of absence.