'Supposed to be your heir,' said he, putting the suggestion gently; 'long, long may it be only supposition, Deb; but a few thousands yearly--say five--would make us all right, and then we have the run of the house here--what more do we want? So all will be right, even with the county, I say again, if we only play our cards well.' She had played _her_ cards well in the past time, she thought, as Hawkey, whom conversation always made thirsty, left her in quest of a brandy and soda. Seated in her luxurious boudoir, her memory went back to the days of her early life, as an underpaid and hard-worked governess; and then to those when she became the humble and useful companion to Roland's mother, and, after her death, a kind of guardian to Maude on the latter leaving school. Then came the accident that befel the old Laird in the hunting-field at Macbeth's Stank--a wet ditch with a 'yarner' on each side, the terror of the Fife Hunt, but said to have been leapt by the usurper's horse when he returned from Dunnimarle after slaying the family of Macduff; and how necessary she made herself to the suffering invalid; how (artfully) she seemed to anticipate his thoughts, to understand all his wants, his favourite dishes and so forth; and how grateful he became to her, and how she clung to him like a barnacle or octopus, without seeming to do so. How necessary he soon found it to have a clever, sensible, and loving woman--one rather handsome, too--to look after him, when his two sons--especially that spendthrift in the Scots Guards--seemed to regard him as only a factor or banker to draw upon without mercy; and so he married her one morning when the weather was very cold; when the early snow was on the Ochil summits and powdering the Lomonds of Fife, and _then_ she knew that she was the wife of a landed gentleman of old and high descent--Colin Lindsay, Laird of Earlshaugh! She was, of course, to be a second mother to Maude (who declined to view her as such) and to his two sons if they became careful; and meantime, ere dying, he handed over to her, by will, as stated, beyond all hope of disputing it at law, every wood, acre, and tree he possessed, causing much uplifting of hands and shaking of heads in ominous wonder throughout the county, and more especially in the East Neuk thereof. But she bore herself well, dressed richly as became her age and new station--kept a handsome carriage with her late husband's arms--the fesse chequy argent and azure for Lindsay--thereon in a lozenge; but was rarely seen in the company of Maude, who did not, would not, and never could, approve of the position so ungenerously assigned to herself and her only surviving brother Roland, who had been much less to blame than his senior of the Household Brigade. And Mrs. Lindsay was just then beginning to discover that she was likely to have--in the person of her brother, as an intrusive, if sometimes necessary factotum--something of a skeleton in her cupboard at Earlshaugh.