We would be sorry if we were necessitated to end our story at the very nick of the triumph of vice. Happily, we have something more to say--nothing less, indeed, than that James Snoddy, the brother of the laird, raised a process--that is, instituted a suit before the Court of Session, to have his brother’s contract of marriage with Mrs Dorothy Dempster annulled and set aside, upon the grounds of deception, circumvention, and _prava causa_; nor had he any trouble in getting a decree, for David and his wife made no appearance, neither could they make any appearance in Edinburgh. Their only resource was to take advantage of that kind of bail called “leg;” an easy affair, insomuch as there is no bond required for appearance anywhere. It was at the time supposed that they had gone to America, that asylum of unfortunates, where one-half of the people cut the throats of the other in the name of liberty. [Illustration] The Story of the Gorthley Twins. It was the custom at one time in Edinburgh for the proprietors of large self-contained houses to give them the names of the properties they had in the country--hence our Panmure House, Tweeddale Court, and so forth--and among them there was Gorthley House, of which no vestige now remains; nay, we are by no means sure where it was situated, beyond the fact that it was somewhere in the Canongate, but gone as it is according to the law of change, its name will always be associated with the law-plea Bruce _versus_ Bruce, which contained the germ of the little romance we are now to relate in our way. And to begin in order, we take the state of matters at the time when the plea began. John Bruce of Gorthley had died, and left a widow and three daughters, two of whom were twins, and the third was the youngest. The names of the twins were Sarah and Martha, who at this time were two fine girls verging upon majority, and as like each other as two white peas; and surely if we might expect, in this world of strife and contention, that there should be found real love and friendship anywhere, it might be in the case of two sisters who had lain so close together for nine months, and who had drunk their milk at the same kindly fountain of a doating mother’s breast. But so full is the moral atmosphere of our fallen world of the spores of hatred, that you may as well try to keep a cheese from the seeds of green mould as the human heart from the germs of ill-will. And so it was that these two young ladies hated each other very heartily, for a reason which we will by and by reveal, to the astonishment of the reader; and this hatred was the counterpart of a contention that had embittered the lives of the father and mother, even up to the time of the former’s death.