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 débris. 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 gasped, barring the way.
She stopped dead. Then she clutched at her skirt, and said feverishly, “Let me pass, sir, or I shall call for help!”
“Call away,” I answered cheerfully. “I will only say that you have run off from the home which has sheltered you for many years, and that your friends are very anxious about you. Where are you staying?”
I glanced at her black dress. It was not mourning exactly, but then Irma never did anything like any one else. A fear took me that it might be little Louis who was dead, and yet for the life of me I dared not ask, knowing how she loved the child.
When I asked where she was staying, she plucked again at her skirt, lifting it a little as when she was being challenged to run a race. But seeing no way clear, she answered as it were under compulsion, “With my Aunt Kirkpatrick at the Nun’s House!”
At first I had the fear that this might prove to be some Catholic place like the convent to which she had been sent in Paris. But it turned out to be only a fine old mansion, standing by itself in a garden with a small grey lodge to it, far out on the road to the Dean.