“Oh, there is no fears of that,” said Mrs. Brown; “if you were transplanting them, as you say, from your grand life to be just in the ordinar’ as they’ve been with me, I wouldna say but that was hard; but it’s easy, easy to change to grandeur and delight; there’s few but’s capable of that.” “If it was all grandeur and delight!” said Rowland; “but there is not very much of the first, and perhaps none at all of the other. No delight for them, I fear. A number of rules they will have to give in to, and talk, dull to them, that they will have to listen to, and no fun, as they call it, at all; I don’t know how they will like being buried in a country place.” “They will have horses and carriages, and everything that heart can desire--and servants to wait on them, hand and foot.” “Oh, yes, they will have horses, but, I suppose, they won’t be able to ride; and carriages they don’t know how to drive; and a road to take exercise upon, which to me is beautiful, but which leads to nothing but a view, and not half-a-dozen people to be seen all the way. Marion will not like that. I may get the boy broken in, but the girl--I don’t know what my wife will do with the girl!” “Ye are no blate,” cried Mrs. Brown, “to speak of my Mey as the girrel! or what your wife would do with her. It’s that that’s ruined you, Jims Rowland--your wife! What had you ado with a wife, a strange woman, when your own dauchter was growing up, and old enough to sit at the head of your table and order your dinner to you! It sets you well to get a wife that will not know what to do with the girrel! What would my sister Mary say to think that was the way you spoke of her bonnie bairn. Man, I never knew ye had such a hard heart!” “The question has nothing to do with my hard heart, if I have a hard heart,” said Rowland. “We’d better leave that sort of thing aside. The question is, how are they to be brought into their new life?” Mrs. Brown wiped her eyes, and held up her head. “The thing is just this,” she said, “I see no other way, nor any difficulty, for my part: ye’ll just take them home.” “Ah!” said the agitated father walking up and down the room, “it is very easy to speak. Take them home, but when, and how? without any breaking in? without any preparation to a life they don’t understand and won’t like?” “Bless me! are you taking them to be servants, or to learn a trade!” cried Mrs. Brown. CHAPTER XIII.