In this mood she got to the top of the Wynd, and was hurrying along the first or covered portion, overspread by the front lands, and therefore dark, when she encountered a man rolled up in a cloak. Even in the dim light coming from the street lamp on the main pavement, she recognised him in a moment. He was slouching down by the side of the wall, and did not seem to notice her. So Christian held back, until he had got farther on. She felt herself concentrated upon his movements, and observed that he hung about her own stair, standing in the middle of the close, with his eye fixed on the dark windows of the deserted flat. There was no meaning in his action. It seemed simply that his eye was bound to that house. So far Christian understood the ways of the world; but there are deeper mysteries there than she wotted of or dreamed just then. A man will examine a gangrene if it is hopeful; and will hope, and shrink, and be alarmed, when the hope fails only but a little; nay, he will dread the undoing of the bandages, lest the hope of the prior undoing should be changed by the new aspect into a conviction of aggravation; but there is a state of that ailment, as of moral ills, where all hope having vanished, despair comes to be reconciled to its own terrors, and the eye will peer into the hopeless thing, ay, and be charmed with it, and dally with it, as an irremediable condition, which is his own peculium, a part of his nature, so far changed. He then becomes a lover of pity, as before he was a seeker for hope; and, like a desperate bankrupt, will hawk the balance-sheet of his ills, to make up for the subtraction from his credit by the sympathy of the world. So did that man look upon that house, a hopeless sore, after twenty years pain and agony, with these green spots, and the caustic-defying "proud flesh." Was not the fleshless corpse of his dead wife still there? She was a skeleton; but he could only fancy her as he had seen her twenty years before, a young and beautiful woman. Nor was he alarmed as Christian, weary of waiting but not unsteeled now for a recognition, stept forward and confronted him.
"Mrs. Gourlay!" he said, as he peered into her hard face.
"Ay, guidwife Christian, as my husband says. Christian Gourlay that is--Christian Dempster that was."