Mrs Macfarlane was the only daughter of a gentleman of Roxburghshire, who had perished in the insurrection of 1715. An attempt was made by his surviving friends to save the estate from forfeiture, so that it might have been enjoyed by his orphan daughter, then just emerged into womanhood. But almost all hope of that consummation was soon closed, and, in the meantime, the unfortunate young lady remained in a destitute situation. The only arrangement that could be devised by the generosity of her friends, was to permit her to reside periodically for a certain time in each of their houses—a mode of subsistence from which her spirit recoiled, but to which, for a little while, she was obliged to submit. It was while experiencing all the bitter pangs of a dependent situation, encountered for the first time, and altogether unexpectedly, that Mr Macfarlane, a respectable and elderly law agent, who had been employed by her father, came forward and made an offer of his hand. Glad to escape from the immediate pain of dependency, even at the hazard of permanent unhappiness, she accepted the proposal, although her relations did every thing they could to dissuade her from a match so much beneath her rank. The proud spirit of Elizabeth Ker swelled almost to bursting, when she entered the dwelling of her low-born husband; and the humble marriage-feast which was there placed before her, seemed in her eyes as the first wages of her degradation. But her own reflections might have been endured, and in time subdued, if they had not been kept awake by the ungenerous treatment which she received from all her former friends. The pride of caste was at this period unbroken in Scotland, and it rigorously demanded the exclusion of “the doer’s wife” from all the circles in which she had previously moved. The stars made a conspiracy to banish the sun. If Mrs Macfarlane had been educated properly, she would have been able to repel scorn with scorn, and, in these tergiversations of the narrow-spirited great, would have only seen their degradation, not her own. But under her deceased mother, a scion of a better house than even her father’s, she had grown up in the full participation of all the ridiculous notions as to caste, and of course was herself deeply sensible of the advantages she had forfeited. Rendered irritable in the highest degree by consciousness of her own loss, she received every slight thrown upon her by society into her innermost heart, where it festered and fed upon her very vitals. She found that she had fallen, that the step was irretrievable; and as factitious degradation, imposed by the forms of society, always in a short time becomes real, her character suffered a material deterioration. She took refuge from offended self-love in a spirit of hatred and contempt for her fellow-matrons, and began to entertain feelings from which, in earlier and happier years, she would have shrunk as from actual crime.