Nevertheless, to her credit, perhaps, as a woman of discernment, she married Roger McGhie, and that though far younger, richer, and gallanter men stood ready at her call. But the needy king and his new ministry had stripped her estates of most that her husband had so painfully gathered. Little was left her but the barren heritages of Grenoch--where, indeed, was heather enough and granite to spare, but where crops were few and scanty, and where even meadow-hay had a fashion of vanishing in the night whenever the Dee water took it into its head to sweep through the narrow Lane, raising the loch till it overflowed the low-lying meads nearly to the house-door of Grenoch itself. Then, on the other hand, the acres of Balmaghie were undoubtedly broad, the finances of the laird unhurt by government exactions, and the house of Balmaghie a wide and pleasant place compared with the little square block-house of the Grenoch, sitting squatly like a moorhen's-nest on its verge of reedy loch. So the Lady Susannah became, not long after Kate betook herself to Holland, the mistress of Balmaghie; but from some feeling of restraint or shame Roger McGhie had hitherto carefully kept the matter from his daughter, whose sentiments in the matter he had good reasons to suspect. It had not seemed the least of the attractions of the house of Balmaghie to my lady that at the time of her marriage it wanted the presence of the girl who till now had been its mistress. And she resolved that, once out, Kate should abide so--that is, till the time came when a match politically and socially suitable could be found for the girl, and also a home not too near the well-trimmed garden pleasances of Balmaghie. So when Murdo McAlister, Lord of Barra, arrived at the dismantled fortalice of Thrieve as the guest of my Lord Maxwell, and word was brought that the exile desired an audience with "the lady of Balmaghie," the duchess listened complacently enough to the words of the Lord of Barra and the Small Isles. The courtier dwelt much on the changes which were so sure to come, the favor of the king's son-in-law, his own great position in Holland, and the yet greater to be attained when his Dutch master should take over the throne of Britain. And we may be sure that my Lord of Barra spoke well. Calmly he told of the dangerous position of the young maid in Holland; lightly he referred to his own "rescue" of her in the Street of the Butchery--of which, indeed, Kate had herself given an account in one of her rare letters to her father from the city of Amersfort. He told how she was quartered unsuitably with private soldiers and their wives. But there he trod on dangerous ground, for in a moment the laird took up his parable against him. "Lochinvar and young Earlstoun may indeed be private soldiers in Dutchdom," said Roger McGhie, bluntly, "but do not forget that they are very good Galloway gentlemen here."