All which might truly be applied to Mysie Craig; but as yet the stronger stem to which she clung was her mother, and it was not likely, nor was it in reality, that that affection would prove to her anything but the spring of happiness, for it was ripened by love, and the earnings of the nimble fingers, moving often into the still hours of the night, not only kept the wolf from the door, but let in the lambs of domestic harmony and peace. Would that these things had so continued; but there are other wolves than those of poverty, and the “ae lamb o’ the fauld” cannot be always under the protection of the ewe; and so it happened on a certain night, not particularised in the calendar, that our Mysie, having finished one of these floral petticoats on which she had been engaged for many weeks, went forth with her precious burden to deliver the same to its impatient owner--no other than the then famous Anabella Gilroy, who resided in Advocate’s Close. Of which fine lady, by the way, we may say that of all the gay creatures who paraded between “the twa Bows,” no one displayed such ample folds of brocaded silk, nodded her pon-pons more jantily, or napped with a sharper crack her high-heeled shoes, all to approve herself to “the bucks” of the time, with their square coats brocaded with lace, their three-cornered hats on the top of their bob-wigs, their knee-buckles and shoe-buckles. And certainly not the least important of those, both in his own estimation and that of the sprightly Anabella, was George Balgarnie, a young man who had only a year before succeeded to the property of Balgruddery, somewhere in the north, and of whom we might say that in forming him Nature had taken so much pains with the building up of the body, that she had forgotten the mind, so that he had no more spiritual matter in him than sufficed to keep his blood hot, and enable his sensual organs to work out their own selfish gratifications; or, to perpetrate a metaphor, he was all the polished mahogany of a piano, without any more musical springs than might respond to one keynote of selfishness. And surely Anabella had approved herself to the fop to some purpose, for when our sempstress with her bundle had got into the parlour of the fine lady, she encountered no other than Balgarnie--a circumstance apparently of very small importance, but we know that a moment of time is sometimes like a small seed, which contains the nucleus of a great tree, perhaps a poisonous one. And so it turned out that while Anabella was gloating over the beautiful work of the timid embroideress, Balgarnie was busy admiring the artist, but not merely, perhaps not at all, as an artist--only as an object over whom he wished to exercise power.