Never was anything seen like it in our time. I mean the transformation of Aunt Jen, the hard crabapple of our family, after the entrance of the Maitland children into the household of Heathknowes. Not that my aunt had much faith in Irma. She had an art, which my aunt counted uncanny, indeed savouring of the sin of witchcraft. It mattered not at all what Irma was given to wear--an old tartan of my grandmother's Highland Mary days when she was a shepherdess by the banks of Cluden, a severe gown designed on strictly architectural principles by the unabashed shears of Aunt Jen herself, a bodice and skirt of my mother's, dovelike in hue and carrying with them some of her own retiring quality in every line. It was all the same, with a shred or two of silk, with a little undoing here, a little tightening there, a broad splash of colour cut from one of my Uncle Rob's neckcloths--not anywhere, but just in the right place--Irma could give to all mankind the impression of being the only person worth looking at in the parish. With these simple means she could and did make every other girl, though attired in robes that had come all the way from Edinburgh, look dowdy and countrified. Also she had the simple manner of those who stand in no fear of any one taking a liberty with them. Her position was assured. Her beauty spoke for itself, and as for the old tartan, the slab-sided merino, the retiring pearl-grey wincey, their late owners did not know them again when they appeared in the great square Marnhoul pew in the parish church, which Irma insisted upon occupying. I think that a certain scandal connected with this, actually caused more stir in the parish than all the marvel of the appearance of the children in the Haunted House. And for this reason. Heathknowes was a Cameronian household. The young men of Heathknowes were looked upon to furnish a successor to their father as an elder in the little meeting-house down by the Fords. But with the full permission of my grandmother, and the tacit sympathy of my grandfather, each Sabbath day Miss Irma and Sir Louis went in state to the family pew at the parish kirk (a square box large enough to seat a grand jury). The children were perched in the front, Irma keeping firm and watchful guard over her brother, while in the dimmer depths, seen from below as three sturdy pairs of shoulders against the dusk of a garniture of tapistry, sat the three Cameronian young men of Heathknowes. Nothing could so completely and fully have certified the strength of my grandmother's purpose than that she, a pillar of the Covenant, thus complacently allowed her sons to frequent the public worship of an uncovenanted and Erastian Establishment. But there was at least one in the house of Heathknowes not to be so misled by the outward graces of the body.