“In my youth it was the man of the world who set the fashions; now it is the tailor and the young sir fresh from his studies. What should these persons know of the subject?”
Balnillo was in heaven; from force of habit he ran his hand down the leg crossed upon his knee. The familiar inward curve of the slim silk ankle between his fingers was like the touch of a tried and creditable friend; it might almost be said that he turned to it for sympathy. He would have liked to tell his ankle that to-night he had found a perfection almost as great as its own.
Lord Grange, who had taken leave of his hostess and was departing, paused to look at him.
“See,” said he, taking an acquaintance by the elbow, “look yonder at that doited Davie Balnillo.”
“He is telling her about his riding of the circuit,” said the other, grinning.
“The circuit never made him smile like that,” replied Grange sardonically.
An hour later Christian Flemington stood at the top of the circular staircase. Below it, Balnillo was at the entrance-door, sending everyone within reach of his voice in search of her sedan chair. When it was discovered, he escorted her down and handed her into it, then, according to the custom of the time, he prepared to attend its progress to her lodgings in Hyndford’s Close. The streets were even dirtier and damper than before, but he was as anxious to walk from Lady Anne’s party as he had been determined to be carried to it. He stepped along at the side of the chair, turning, when they passed a light, to see the dignified silhouette of Madam Flemington’s head as it appeared in shadow against the farther window.
Speech was impossible as they went, for avoidance of the kennel and the worse obstacles that strewed the city at that hour, before the scavengers had gone their rounds, kept David busy. The only profit that a man got by seeing his admired one home in Edinburgh in 1745 was the honour and glory of it.
When she emerged from the chair in Hyndford’s Close he insisted upon mounting the staircase with her, though its narrowness compelled them to go in single file; and when they stopped halfway up at the door in the towering ‘land,’ he bade her good-night and descended again, consoled for the parting by her permission that he should wait upon her on the following day.