There was another mother in the case, as has been signified,--poor old Luckie Hedderwick--who had never been considered more than a sickly ‘feckless’ body in her best days, and who was now bed-ridden and dependent on her daughter’s industry for her daily bread. Whether Luckie had been from the first an accomplished and hardened deceiver so that she could at last bring forward a strategy worthy of the rival mother--the Lady of Drumsheugh; whether the approach of death began to unseal her dim and dull eyes, and to teach the foolish, ignorant old woman wisdom beyond all earthly sagacity; whether the former dominie who visited his aged and sick parishioner at the cottage in Peggy’s unavoidable absence, was secretly at the bottom of the manœuvre, Luckie Hedderwick suddenly set an interdict on all future friendship and love-making between Peggy and the laird. The old woman had been till then as silly and inconsiderate as any lass in her teens in taking the greatest pride and pleasure in Peggy’s triumphs and conquests, and in encouraging the girl in what other people held to be Peggy’s sins of vanity and unwarrantable ambition; but she now forbade her child, under pain of her mother’s lamentations and reproaches--which were worse than her wrath--so much as to have a meeting with the gentleman, if she could possibly foresee and prevent it. Peggy was broken-hearted and in despair, but she never dreamt of defying, and still less of cheating, her mother. The laird, arrested in the full force of his passion, was goaded to the brink of madness and driven half beside himself. No more well-understood foregatherings with Peggy; no more interceptings of the girl on her way to the well, or the shop, or a neighbour’s house; no more strolls among the whins and broom[3] in the twilight, careless who saw; no more walking of his horse--or leaping from the saddle and walking himself--beside her when he came up with her, which he was pretty sure to do, on the return of both from Craigie market; no more climbing of the breezy, heathery hill and descending on the other side where the green trees shaded the road, throwing a white shower of blossom there in the spring, being full of birds singing as they rifled the fruit in summer, and in autumn dropping blood-shot leaves among the mud and mire. The laird would gallantly insist on placing Peggy’s basket before him on the saddle, or would carry it for her. Balcairnie either trotting on with a passing nod, or falling discreetly into the background, determined to show that he was not curious over much, or bent on spoiling sport.