"Most people liked dealing with this man Yarrow. As for me, I never could bear him. He had a scornful eye, not questing, like his son's (whose neck I could twist), but merely sneering--especially when, at distant market towns, he would hear me addressed as 'Laird,' which is my rightful title. At such times he would smile a little smile that bit like vitriol, and turn away. And I knew well enough that he was thinking and saying to himself--'Miser Hobby--Miser Hobby!' Still, had I had the sense to look at the matter in the right light, this should have cheered me--that he only _despised_ me, I mean. For if Joseph Yarrow, the cleverest man in all the neighbourhood, was not calling me 'Murderer Hobby,' then I was safe from all the rest. But so curious a thing is man, and so much harder to bear is scorn than the worst accusation of crime, that it was often on my tongue tip to jolt his self-complaisance with a little inkling of the truth. "All the same, I laid it all up against him--some day I would catch him coming home with a goodly sum. So, after long thought, I arranged that a letter should be sent to warn him that one Steve Cairney, a slippery 'dealer' who had long owed him a large amount, would be at the Longtown Fair to sell horses, and that it was now or never. The thing was true. Nothing, indeed, could be truer. Jeremy was forewarned, and all should have passed off easily and fitly as the drawing on of an old glove. But because that fool Jeremy had seen instruments of music (of which he is inordinately fond) by the score and gross in Yarrow's shop down at Breckonside, he must needs put the man into a cell behind the Monks' Oven, instead of finishing the matter out of hand. Aphra also mixed herself up in the affair, urging Yarrow, who must have had an excellent idea where he was, to sign the cheque they had found on him, as if that made any difference! I know a man in Luxembourg who will give two-thirds value on a cheque drawn on a sound account, and, in addition, provide the signature from any reasonable copy. It is never the first owners who lose with such things. There were plenty of Yarrow's receipted bills about the house, and there need have been no difficulty about that. But unhappily I was from home, and so everything went to pigs and whistles. "Then it pleased Miss Orrin to take a violent jealousy of my granddaughter, Elsie Stennis, and to sequester her somewhere about the premises, which, of course, brought the storm about our ears in full force. With this folly, worse than any crime, I am glad to record that I had nothing whatever to do. Doubtless the business was carried out by Jeremy under the orders of his sister Aphra. I have at least this to be thankful for, that as long as I retained the full and entire direction of affairs Deep Moat Grange might have been called the vale of peace and plenty.