"To speak about other matters, I send you a letter--worthy the light-headed, undutiful fuil from whose vain hand it comes. You will see she will have none of my counsel, and puts my offer of an honorable roof over her, and a home dependent on no caprice or strange woman's pleasure, in the light of a good meaning--will to do kindness without power. If it were not for Archie's sake, and for the good-fame of their broken house, she should never more say light word to me. He has been but a month dead, this miserable man of hers--that she left her mother's sick-bed for--and look at her words! without so much as a decent shadow on them, to tell where the sore gloom of death had fallen so late. I am growing testy in my spirit, child; though truly sorrow would set me better than anger, to look upon the like of a born fuil like this--her brother ruined, and her man killed. Archie, a laboring wayfarer, with his good name tarnished, and his father's inheritance, lost; the husband for whose sake she brought down her mother's gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, taken away suddenly from this world by the red grip of a violent death, and the wanton fuil what can I call her else?--as if she had not gotten enough to sober her for a while, returning in haste to her vanities--feared to leave the atmosphere of them--singing songs over the man's new grave, and giving long nights to strangers, when she can but spare a brief minute to say a kind word to her one brother--a kind word, said I! I should say a bitter one, of folly and selfishness,--not comfort to him in his labor, but records of her own sinful vanities. "You will say I am bitter, child, at this fuil--so I am--the more that I cannot be done with her, as I could with any other of her kind. She is still the bairn of Isabel Balfour--in good or in evil I am trysted to keep my eye upon her. I have been asking about the household she is in. The mistress of it, her friend, is at least of pure name; a scheming woman as I hear from one of their own vain kind--who has a pride in yoking the fuils about her in the unstable bands of marriage. Isabel has her mother's fair face; they will be wedding her again for some passing fancy, or for dirt of siller. I scarce know which is the worst. I will have no hand in it, however it happens. Since she will be left to herself, she must. If deadly peril ever comes, I must put forth the strong hand.