A Scottish lady of the kindly old school, one who in infancy had been nursed and fondled by warm-hearted and periwigged old gentlemen and hoopskirted gentlewomen, who boasted that they were the last of the true old Scots, born when a Stuart was on the throne, and before their country was sold by the Whigs, and when her Parliament assembled on the ringing of St. Gileses bell; she who in girlhood had seen and known many of the gallant and loyal who had dined and drunk with Kilmarnock and Balmerino, and who had drawn their swords for James VIII. at Falkirk and Culloden; who treasured in secret the white rose, and yearly drank to "the king ower the water"--she felt now that she would be sadly at a loss and strange among English modern society. Her local ideas and usefulness, her strong Jacobite sympathies and loyalty to a dead race of kings, her nervous terror of democracy and foreigners, might pass for eccentricity; but how could those among whom she would now be thrown know or understand her little weakness for the heraldry, genealogy, connexions, and past glories of the Maxwells of Nithsdale and the Crawfords of Rohallion; for she knew them to be people who spoke of the late cardinal-duke as "the dead Pretender;" who voted all that was not English absurd or vulgar, and who basked in the rays of the star of Brunswick as it beamed on the breast of "the first gentleman in Europe," the future George IV.: with her powder and patches, her broad Scottish accent, and her high-heeled shoes, she felt that she would be, in such an atmosphere, an anachronism--a fish out of water! These minor considerations of self, however, were completely merged or lost eventually in distress at the prospect of being separated from her husband, and in dread of the perils and hardships he might have to encounter at the seat of war--at his advanced years, too! To add to her anxiety, the death-watch had ticked for several nights in the four-poster of the great old state bedroom, and this devilish little pediculus wrought the good lady as much alarm as Sir Harry Calvert's missive from the Horse Guards had done. Amid all this, Flora's chief thought was, that at Shorncliffe she would be nearer Quentin Kennedy, by the entire length nearly of Britain, and as Lord Rohallion was to pass through London, he would see the Duke of York personally about him and his prospects. The last night they were to spend in the old castle was a wild, cold, and bitter one. The waves of the Firth of Clyde boiled in mountains of white foam over the Partan Craig, and as Elsie Irvine said, "the yowls of the sealghs were heard on the wind, just as they were on the nicht that Quentin was shipwrecked, and a' body kent they were never heard for nocht."