But this was set down to modesty, or fatigue, or crossness, which unfortunately had grown of late to be a recognised quality of Archie. And Mr. Rowland himself took down a brace of grouse to the Manse next morning, a proud father handing out “my son’s birds,” as if Archie had been the finest shot in the world. But this was not Archie’s fault, who knew nothing of the transaction. He managed to be able to carry his gun like other feeble sportsmen after that terrible initiation. Thus both Mr. Rowland’s children learned to adapt themselves to the duties of their new sphere. CHAPTER XXII. Rowland’s ideas of the absence of society in his new home were confounded by the number of visits his wife received within the first six weeks of their stay at Rosmore. It had, I have no doubt, been noised abroad that the wife of the great railway man was, in the loose but convenient phraseology of the time, “a lady,” and that there was therefore no appreciable peril to the gentility of her caller, from making her acquaintance. Lady Jean, of course, was one of the first to call upon her brother’s tenant. Her arrival was attended by circumstances of which James Rowland could never think afterwards without shame and humiliation. Indeed it all but happened to him to turn the little shabby old lady who was trudging through the woods in short petticoats and a waterproof to the kitchen door as the natural entrance. Lady Jean was a little woman of about fifty, who had long ceased to take the least pride in her appearance, or to care what people thought on the subject. This last presumption was of course quite unnecessary in the parish of Rosmore, where everybody knew who she was, and where, had she gone about in cloth of gold, it would have made no particular difference. She wore tweed accordingly with the most reckless indifference to quality (I believe the quality was generally good--it came in bales from Romans and Paterson, which the Glasgow shopkeepers thought disloyal to them, and unpatriotic)--one society gown after another being manufactured for her as need arose; and she was fond of giving a gown-piece to any girl that might strike her fancy, walked well, and was, as she expressed it in pregnant Scotch, “purpose-like.” This is not to say that Lady Jean could not be every inch the Earl’s sister when occasion demanded, and strike terror into the Radical multitude, or that she did not possess, and occasionally wear, a wardrobe more fitted to her condition.