To get the better of the unhealthy and morbid state of mind into which I now found myself falling, I began to break through my old habits of retirement, and to avail myself of such society as Ballater and its neighbourhood afforded. The hot weather had begun early this year, and the summer residents were already established before my arrival. I was a sort of 'great unknown' concerning whom there were floating about many interesting and romantic stories; therefore I found no lack of eager acquaintances as soon as I cared to make them. Prominent among these was a certain Mr. Farington, a Liverpool solicitor, who, after having made a yearly retreat to the Highlands each autumn, had now retired from business and taken the lease of a large house at the foot of Craigendarroch. He had been married twice, first to a lady of dazzling pecuniary charms who had left him one daughter, and after her death to a large and handsome lady who gave me a strong impression of having had doubtful antecedents. This second wife had a numerous family, ranging from five years old to fifteen, between whom and their half-sister was fixed the gulf of her mother's fortune. At a very early stage of our acquaintance the eldest Miss Farington, who was a good-looking young woman of three and twenty, with a strong sense of the importance attached to an income of fifteen hundred a year, had honoured me by a marked partiality for which I, in my new sociability, at first felt grateful. It was pleasant to find some one who could pass an opinion, even if it was not a very original opinion, on a picture, a book, or a landscape, and Miss Farington could always do that with great precision. Perhaps, too, it flattered my vanity to be appealed to as the one representative of high civilisation amidst barbarian hordes. But when it became plain even to my modest merit that the lady proposed to annex me, I grew suddenly coy; and I then found to my surprise that, diffident as my disfigurement had made me, I was still, like the rest of my sex, humble only to one woman, and mightily fatuous as regarded the rest. But if Miss Farington was merely what one calls 'a nice girl,' with no particularly conspicuous qualities of alluring sweetness or captivating vivacity, she had one virtue which would not have shamed an ancient Roman--an indomitable resolution that would not know defeat.