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splendor of kilts, or in somber suits over shirts stiff with starch and stiff hats upon their heads. Whereas he wore soft trousers made of some fawn-colored skin, an unstarched shirt with a scarf at its neck, an open coat of the same skin that dangled long fringes from its arm seams and hem, and a soft fawn hat with a low crown and wide brim. Under the hat was a thin, deeply tanned face; his hair was black sprinkled with grey and curled on to his shoulders, and his black beard and mustache, greyer than his hair, were carefully trimmed into the exact same style as the Devil wore.
    She rose to her feet, at which moment he noticed her.
    “Elizabeth?” he asked, hand out.
    She didn’t take it. “You know that I am not Jean?”
    “Why should I think you Jean when you’re obviously not?”
    “But you—you wrote for—for Jean,” she floundered, not daring to look at his face.
    “And your father wrote offering me you instead. It’s quite immaterial,” said Alexander Kinross, turning to signal to a man in his wake. “Load her trunks into the cart, Summers. I’ll take her to the hotel in a hackney.” Then, to her: “I’d have found you sooner if my dynamite hadn’t chanced to be aboard your ship. I had to clear it and get it safely stowed before some enterprising villain got to it first. Come.”
    One hand beneath her elbow, he guided her through the aisle and out into what seemed an enormously wide street that was as much a depot as a thoroughfare, littered with goods and crowded with men attacking the wood-block paving with picks.
    “They’re putting the railway through to the docks,” Alexander Kinross said as he thrust her upward into one of several loitering hackneys. Then, as soon as he was seated beside her: “You’re hot. It’s no wonder, in those clothes.”
    Finding her courage, she turned her head to study his face properly. Miss MacTavish was right, he wasn’t handsome, though his features were regular enough. Perhaps that they were not Drummond or Murray features? Hard to believe that he was her own first cousin. But what chilled Elizabeth was his definite resemblance to the Devil. Not only in beard and mustache; his brows were jet-black and sharply pointed, and his eyes, sunk deep between black lashes, were so dark that she could not distinguish pupil from iris.
    He returned her scrutiny, but with more detachment. “I’d expected you to be like Jean—fair,” he said.
    “I take after the Black Scot Murrays.”
    Came a smile; it was indeed, as Miss MacTavish had said, a wonderful smile, but no part of Elizabeth’s anatomy went weak at the sight of it. “So do I, Elizabeth.” He reached out a hand and put it under her chin to turn her face to the brilliant light. “But your eyes are remarkable—dark, yet not brown or black. Navy-blue. That’s good! It says there’s a chance our sons will look more like Scots than we do.”
    His touch made her uncomfortable, so did his reference to their sons; as soon as she felt he would not take offense, she pulled away from his fingers, stared at the purse in her lap.
    The cab horse was plodding uphill away from the wharves and into a genuinely big city that seemed, to Elizabeth’s unschooled eyes, quite as busy as Edinburgh. Carriages, sulkies, gigs, hackneys, carts, drays, wagons and horse-drawn omnibuses thronged the narrow streets, lined first with ordinary buildings, but then with shops rendered alien by awnings that jutted to the edge of the pavement; their presence hid the contents of the shop windows from any traveler on the road, a frustration.
    “The awnings,” he said, it seemed able to read her mind—yet another characteristic of the Devil—“keep shoppers dry when it rains and cool when the sun shines.”
    To which Elizabeth made no reply.
    Twenty minutes after leaving the dockside the hackney swung into a wider street flanked on its far side by a sprawling park wherein the grass looked absolutely dead. Twin tracks ran down the middle