Lady Peggy was crushed and heart-broken in her helplessness and her miserable sense of culpability, though she was hardly accountable for her faults as a matron. She found no resource in reading, though good books would have been a strengthening and sustaining influence; while Peggy, as a carefully instructed Scotch child, had been fond of her book--a little rustic scholar, and the taste would have remained with any food for its sustenance. But when we learn in ‘Lord Campbell’s Life’ that the library even of a well-born, classically cultivated divine consisted of some odd volumes of the ‘Spectator,’ two volumes of ‘Tom Jones,’ and the ‘History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless,’ some idea may be formed of the dearth of profane literature at Drumsheugh. The stock of books had not increased since the reign of the second George, and was scarcely a whit better than Peggy might have found in her mother’s cottage room. Certainly Luckie Hedderwick had not owned a cookery-book or a work on farriery, which would have been in a measure supererogatory, seeing that she possessed few and simple materials for cookery, and had no horses to keep in health. But she had thumbed, well-preserved copies of the ‘Death of Abel’ and ‘Blind Harry’ to match ‘The Cloud of Witnesses’--this branch of the Ramsays having been on the Whig and Covenanting side in politics and religion--and ‘Allan Ramsay’s Songs,’ in a much more tattered condition, at Drumsheugh. Peggy’s sole earthly stays consisted in the faithful reading of the little pocket Bible which had descended to her from her mother, and the somewhat rigid observance of the sabbath and unfailing attendance at the kirk in which she had been brought up, to which she clung, and from which neither fraud nor force on Jenny’s part could detach her. The minister was Peggy’s old friend, the Dominie, who took an interest in her, and had always a kind word and glance for her when they met, though in the ordinarily dreamy, absorbed life of a book-worm, he never guessed she was again in circumstances well-nigh as perilous as those from which he had helped to deliver her. But, however rambling and incoherent his prayers, or dry and doctrinal his sermons, they were always solemn, holy words delivered by God’s commissioned messenger to Peggy. They served as balm to the wounded spirit, and bracing to the unnerved will, they saved her from despair. Yet Peggy was fast losing all modest satisfaction in her front seat in the ‘laft,’ all womanly pride in her appearance and surroundings. Disengaging herself with difficulty, and almost running away to get to the kirk, walking there in all states of the weather rather than provoke discussion by summoning Johnny Fuggie to drive her, Peggy would reach her destination with disordered, shabby, black dress, ill-arranged head-gear, shoes almost as cumbered with the soil as ever were Johnny Fuggie’s on working days--a poor, hunted, forlorn-looking waif of a laird’s lady.