Nobody proposed that Peggy should accompany her husband. It would have doubled the considerable expense of the journey, while the laird was but a poor man for his station. Besides, to tell the truth, Peggy, with all her sweetness and humility, would have been of very little use, rather a good deal of an incumbrance, as a travelling companion. She had been rendered just then still more _distrait_ and lost by the sudden death of her own mother, poor Luckie Hedderwick, which happened not long after Peggy had been transferred to Drumsheugh. The melancholy event overwhelmed Peggy with sorrow to an extent which the laird and his mother were inclined to consider unreasonable. They did not mean to be unkind, but it was difficult for them, after their first sympathy with Peggy in her grievous shock and the solemnity of the occasion had worn away, to regard the widow’s death otherwise than as a release to more than herself, an opportune end to one of the most trying of the awkward complications involved in the marriage. It was still harder to be quite patient with Peggy for having so little judgment in her lamentations for my ‘mither’ as not to recognise the compensations in the trial, and to remain the next thing to inconsolable--letting herself get more stupid and shyer than ever in her affliction, when the sole foundation for it was the death of a ‘frail,’ bed-ridden woman well up in years and laden with infirmities, so that she had become betimes a burden both to herself and others. She could not have been long spared to her friends in the nature of things. Peggy could not have seen much more of her mother in the circumstances. If Luckie had not happily been taken away at a stroke, her daughter could not have been permitted to leave her husband’s house to wait upon her mother without signal incongruity and a host of serious objections. Peggy ought to be thankful that she had escaped these divided duties, and to rest content with having been a good daughter to her mother when the girl still belonged to the old woman, before Peggy had married far above her in rank, and thus raised heavy barriers between the pair. The poor soul herself had been reasonable. She had been tolerably reconciled to what was inevitable, while she had cherished the utmost pride and pleasure in her daughter’s lot. Peggy had been permitted to gladden her mother’s heart in this respect: she ought to remember that no woman, whether old or young, could have everything in this world.