the house she had scraped acquaintance, and to whom, for the securing of power over her through her imagination, she had made the strangest and most appalling disclosures. Amongst other secret favours, she had promised to compound for her a horrible mixture--some of whose disgusting ingredients, as potent as hard to procure, she named in her awe-stricken hearing--which, administered under certain conditions and with certain precautions, one of which was absolute secrecy in regard to the person who provided it, must infallibly secure for her the affections of any man on whom she might cast a loving eye, and whom she could, either with or without his consent, contrive to cause partake of the same. This girl she now sought, and from her learned all she knew about Malcolm. Pursuing her enquiries into the nature and composition of the household, however, Mrs Catanach soon discovered a far more capable and indeed less scrupulous associate and instrument in Caley. I will not introduce my reader to any of their evil councils, although, for the sake of my own credit, it might be well to be less considerate, seeing that many, notwithstanding the super-abundant evidence of history, find it all but impossible to believe in the existence of such moral abandonment as theirs. I will merely state concerning them, and all the relations of the two women, that Mrs Catanach assumed and retained the upper hand, in virtue of her superior knowledge, invention, and experience, gathering from Caley, as she had hoped, much valuable information, full of reactions, and tending to organic development of scheme in the brain of the arch-plotter. But their designs were so mutually favourable as to promise from the first a final coalescence in some common plan for their attainment. Those who knew that Miss Campbell, as Portlossie regarded her, had been in reality Lady Lossie, and was the mother of Malcolm, knew as well that Florimel had no legal title even to the family cognomen; but if his mother, and therefore the time of his mother’s death, remained unknown, the legitimacy of his sister would remain unsuspected even upon his appearance as the heir. Now there were but three besides Mrs Catanach and Malcolm who did know who was his mother, namely, Miss Horn, Mr Graham, and a certain Mr Morrison, a laird and magistrate near Portlossie, an elderly man, and of late in feeble health. The lawyers the marquis had employed on his death-bed did not know: he had, for Florimel’s sake taken care that they should not. Upon what she knew and what she guessed of these facts regarded in all their relations according to her own theories of human nature the midwife would found a scheme of action.