Consequently he gaed staiggerin' aboot as gin he had been tied to the tail o' an inveesible balloon.

Unco licht heidit, but no muckle hairm in him by natur'." He never would remain in the library after the day began to ebb.

The moment he became aware that the first filmy shadow had fallen from the coming twilight, he caught up his hat, locked the door, gave the key to the sacrist, and hurried away.
The friendly relation between the two struck its roots deeper and deeper during the session, and Alec bade him good-bye with regret.
Mr Cupples was a baffled poet trying to be a humourist--baffled--not by the booksellers or the public--for such baffling one need not have a profound sympathy--but baffled by his own weakness, his incapacity for assimilating sorrow, his inability to find or invent a theory of the universe which should show it still beautiful despite of passing pain, of checked aspiration, of the ruthless storms that lay waste the Edens of men, and dissolve the high triumph of their rainbows.

He had yet to learn that through "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to," man becomes capable of the blessedness to which all the legends of a golden age point.

Not finding, when he most needed it, such a theory even in the New Testament--for he had been diligently taught to read it awry--Mr Cupples took to jesting and toddy; but, haunting the doors of Humour, never got further than the lobby.
With regard to Patrick Beauchamp, as far as Alec could see, his dignity had succeeded in consoling itself for the humiliation it had undergone, by an absolute and eternal renunciation of all knowledge of Alec Forbes's existence..