It is only necessary, to say, in addition, that she was Scottish by birth as well as by blood and name--that she had come to this country nearly forty years before, when Robert Brand was a young man, and attached herself to the fortunes of the family because they were Scottish by blood and she was the very incarnation of faithful feudality--that his daughter had been named Elspeth (since softened to Elsie) at her earnest desire, because she said the name was "the bonniest ava" and she had herself been named after a noble lady who bore it, in her own land, and who had done much to give her that upright carriage by standing as her god-mother--and that for many a long year, now, she had been the working head of the Brand household, scarcely more so since the death of its weak, hysterical mistress, a dozen years before, than while she was alive and pretending to a management which she never understood. If any one person beneath that roof, more legitimately than another, belonged to the family and felt herself so belonging, that person was Elspeth Graeme; and if something of the romantic, which the stern sense of the father would have been slow to approve, had grown up in both his children, it was to the partial love of Elspeth and her stories of Scottish romance, poetry, history, song and superstition, carrying them away from prosaic America to the wimpling burns and haunted glens of the land from which their blood had been derived,--that such a feeling, fortunate or unfortunate as the future might prove, was principally to be credited. "Did you ring, sir? Ech, Lord, the mon's deein'!" were the two very different exclamations made by Elspeth as she entered the room, after the departure of the doctor, and caught sight of the situation in which the master seemed to be lying. "No, Elspeth, I am not 'deein' as you call it," he growled out, when the pain of his exertion had again somewhat subsided and he could find breath for words. "But I wish I was! Is that cursed doctor gone?" "He was gettin' to his carriage the minute, and he's awa by this," answered the housekeeper. "But what ava has he been doin' to ye? Murderin' ye maybe!--they're a dolefu' uncanny set, the doctors!" "If you ever see that man here again, and you don't have him shot or set the dog on him, out of the house you go, neck and crop, the whole pack of you--do you hear!" was the reply to Elspeth's comment on the medical profession. "Just as ye say, master," said Elspeth. "I'll set Carlo at him myself, if ye say so; and wo but the brute will just worry him, for he does na like him and is unco fond of snappin' aboot his heels!" "Where is Elsie?" was the next question. "Gone over to Mistress Hayley's the mornin'. Can I do any thing for your leg, sir?--for the wench in the kitchen's clean daft, and I'll be wanted there, maybe." "No--you can do nothing. My leg is better. But send Elsie to me the moment she comes in."