But the little, quick, irascible custodier of the lonely house had been so long used to the poverty of its scanty furniture that she was now unconscious of it; and when she carefully dusted the high-backed chairs of “Miss Lucy’s parlour,” and closed the shutters lest the sun should spoil the colours of the decayed worn carpet, whose colours had been jumbled in incoherent old age when she herself was but a child, Eesabell Brown was perfectly sincere. She had a veneration for those solitary and quiet inhabitants of the house in which she had lived all her days; they were older dwellers than she; and when she thought of the “Miss Lucy” who had been the pattern and glory of her younger days returning to Murrayshaugh--and she did think of it constantly--it was still as Miss Lucy--the fair, _young_ lady whom in her own girlhood she thought chief of women. This was the romance of the little old housekeeper of Murrayshaugh. She had known few fluctuations of fortune since the great era of their departure; somehow or other Isabell herself had grown old; but unchangeable as the high-backed chairs and the faded carpets seemed Murrayshaugh and Miss Lucy--and they would return. “My mother was housekeeper when the Laird and Miss Lucy gaed to foreign pairts,” she said to Lilias. “Ye’ll have heard o’ Miss Lucy?--ay, but I question if ye ever saw the like o’ her. Wasna auld Greenshaw your grandfather? I thocht that. Weel, Miss Lucy gaed herself, ance errant, to see your mother, to please Mossgray.” Isabell said this with great importance; but Lilias was not overawed, though her face was very grave. “There’s no a young lady atween this and her, wherever she be,” continued the old woman with vehemence, “that it wadna be an honour to even to Miss Lucy, though them that should have kent, didna ken.” A quick indignant glance at the young man accompanied this speech; but the glance of Isabell’s wrath was harmless lightning to the unconscious Halbert. “Me and my sister Jean were brought up here,” said Isabell, more calmly, “and she was married upon a cousin o’ our ain:--maybe ye ken John Broun that’s at the Mount--that’s Jean’s son.” “He is my earliest acquaintance in Fendie,” said Halbert, good-humouredly, “and an honest fellow he is; but why do they leave you alone here?” “My lane!” said Isabell; “am I no housekeeper? and us disna ken the day that Murrayshaugh may come hame!” Lilias checked Halbert with her lifted hand; the old woman’s delusion was sacred. They had entered “Miss Lucy’s parlour,” and were looking at some pictures on the wall. Before the first of these, that of a young man in an antique dress, evidently an old family portrait, Lilias paused with a sudden start. There was a vivid colour and surprised animation on her face, such as Halbert had never seen her have before, and the tone of her voice struck him as she turned to ask about the picture--low, full, and musical, as if the heart throbbed through it more warmly than was its wont.