Though Jenny had to some extent achieved her purpose, and it might have been said that nobody resisted her will, she began to bear a greater grudge against Peggy, and to go near to treating her with a purely vindictive malice, strangely unreasoning, in so reasonable a woman. This was not merely because Jenny had taken advantage of Peggy in every way, and wronged her to the utmost of Jenny’s power, though that is generally a fertile enough source of ill-will in the wrongdoer, but because Peggy beyond a certain point remained invulnerable. Jenny had a secret resentful conviction that while apparently successful, she was really foiled in her chief object of dragging down her cousin below Jenny’s own level, and so obtaining a firm, permanent hold on the poor girl through her errors and fears. Jenny lost her prudence and her temper with it. She proceeded to cast aside the semblance of kindness which she had kept up and even felt for Peggy. Jenny now treated Peggy with positive rudeness and insolence. She was for ever jeering at the young wife because of her unfitness for her position, her ignorance, and her mistakes. And Jenny taunted Peggy on the tenderest point, dwelling on Drumsheugh’s protracted absence, broadly hinting that he, and all belonging to him, were mortally ashamed of the low-born intruder in their ranks. Was there not a cousin of the laird’s who had spent most of her early girlhood at Drumsheugh, and who was now on a visit to the doctor’s wife in Craigie, in the immediate neighbourhood? But though Miss Ramsay did not think it beneath her to come and stay for weeks with an old schoolfellow who had only married a country doctor, did she ever dream of walking out to Drumsheugh nowadays, to hear tell how the laird was getting on, and to make the acquaintance of her new cousin? Mrs. Forsyth, Miss Ramsay’s friend and hostess, could not advise her to the condescension--not even though Drumsheugh was a good patient of Dr. Forsyth’s, and Peggy herself was acquainted with the doctor.