that up the stair; but pit up one single gentleman that is no very particular, that’s all we could do beside.” It was a curious state of affairs. The two long rooms, one above the other, were the whole house. Of the wealth which Margaret was to inherit, she knew absolutely nothing. There was a house “in England,” a vague description which the girl had never much inquired into, seeing that till her twenty-first birthday it was very unlikely that she would have anything whatever to do with it. In the mean time it served a very pleasant purpose in her life. It was the scene of so many dreams and visions of that future which was everything to Margaret, that it could not be said to be an unknown place. She built it and furnished it, and planted trees and invented glades about the unrevealed place, such as in reality it could not boast of. Everything that she thought most beautiful in her small experience of things, or which she found in her considerable experience of books, she placed in this distant mansion, where all manner of pleasant verdure was, which was not to be found in Scotland, flowers and fruits, and green lawns, and abundant foliage, and sunshine such as never shone in Fife. She made pictures of it, and dreamed dreams, but no troublesome dash of reality disturbed the vision. She was the lady of the manor, a title which pleased her fancy hugely, and which she wove into many a fancy; but it was all as visionary as if she had found the Grange in a novel and appropriated it.