For fourteen years more we hear of her as still living in the old house of Gask with her brother Laurence, the new Laird, and with the wife he brought into it in 1795,—the even tenor of her existence broken only by some such incident as a visit to the north of England. During this time it is that we become aware also of the beginnings in her mind of a deep new seriousness, a pious devoutness, which, without interfering with her passionate fondness for song and music, or her liking for mirth and humour and every form of art, continued to be thenceforth the dominant feeling of her life, bringing her into closer and closer affinity with the “fervid” or “evangelical” in religion in whatever denomination it appeared. All this while, or for the greater part of it, there was an engagement between her and a half-cousin of hers, Captain Nairne. He was of Irish birth, but of the Scottish family of the Perthshire Nairnes, and heir, after his elder brother’s death, to the Nairne peerage, should that peerage, which had been attainted after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, be ever revived. Of that there seemed no hope, and Captain Nairne’s fortunes and prospects were of the poorest. Not till the year 1806, therefore, when he was promoted to the brevet rank of Major, and obtained the appointment of Assistant-Inspector-General of Barracks in Scotland, were the betrothed cousins able to marry, she then in her fortieth year, and he nine years older. Their married life of four-and-twenty years was spent almost wholly in Edinburgh. Residing first in a cottage in one of the suburbs of the town, they were known for a good while there as a gentleman and lady of slender means, but distinguished family connections, having an only son, of delicate constitution, whom they were educating privately, and on whose account they lived in a rather retired manner, cultivating a few select friendships, but not going much into general society. Ravelston House, at the foot of the Corstorphine Hills, of which Mrs. Nairne’s younger sister became mistress in 1811 by her marriage with the then Keith of Ravelston, was one of the few places in which Mrs. Nairne and her husband were regularly to be seen at parties. Though this and occasional meetings elsewhere must have brought her into talking acquaintance with Scott,—in whose life Ravelston House was so dear and familiar that it became the suggestion of his castle of Tullyveolan in _Waverley_,—there is no evidence of any intimacy between the two; nor does Mrs. Nairne’s name once occur, I think, in Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_, full though that book is of allusions to persons and things memorable in Edinburgh while the great wizard was its most illustrious inhabitant. One of the many kindly acts of Scott’s life, however, had some influence on the fortunes of Mrs. Nairne. During the visit of George IV. to Edinburgh in 1822, Scott took occasion to suggest to him that the restoration of the attainted Jacobite families to their titles