But Mrs Irving was delighted, and Maggie was exceedingly complacent. Alas, poor Maggie! her fingers were highly educated; her mind was fallow. The thorough training of Hope’s Edinburgh school these good folk in Fendie could not reach; but they could reach the superficials, and they were contented. “Well, Hope,” said Mrs Oswald, in answer to a burst of wonder and disappointment, when they had left Friarsford and its accomplishments behind them; “you remember how you used to resist and be disobedient when your father said that Matthew Irving’s daughter was no companion for you.” “But, mother,” said Hope solemnly, “Adelaide Fendie is just the same--and Adelaide ought to be a lady, if being anybody’s daughter would make her one; but she is not, for all that.” “Adelaide is only a girl like yourself, Hope.” “But she is not a gentlewoman, mamma; and she talks about stitches and tunes like Maggie Irving--and I’m sure I don’t know what’s the use of them.” Hope could not forget her disappointment; there was only one consolation in it. In the midst of all these twinkling artificial lights, the star of Helen Buchanan rose clearer and clearer. Helen was a gentlewoman; and what did it matter that she was poor? “Yonder is Mossgray!” exclaimed Hope, as they approached the house; “yonder he is, up among the trees, and he has got something like a letter in his hand. Do you see him, mother?” The bank of the wan Water sloped upward into gentle braes, a little beyond the house of Mossgray, and the laird was certainly there, walking among the trees, with a step altogether unlike his usual meditative, slow pace. Hope Oswald was an especial favourite with Mr Graeme of Mossgray, and he liked her mother; but Mrs Oswald had too much regard and sympathy for the old man to intrude on his retirement. “We will go in and see Mrs Mense, Hope,” she said; “Mossgray seems occupied just now. You will see him another day.” The large old-fashioned kitchen had a separate entrance to itself. The mass of buildings altogether bore evident testimony to the different periods of their erection, and looked, as their owner said, a natural growth of the homesoil in which the grey walls and rude, dark, massy tower seemed so firmly rooted. A large garden descended from the most modern front of the house to the water, where it was deeply fringed with willows. The clipt, fantastic trees of a generation which admired such clumsy gambols of art were scattered through it, and there was a sun-dial, and many prim flower-beds; but the cherished lilies of Mossgray were not in these stiffly-angled enclosures; their fresh green leaves were beginning to shoot up in the freer borders--those borders on which they gleamed in the dim summer evenings, like errant rays of the moon.