Nothing could be more satisfactory than this report. It ran up the loch and across the mountains. The Duchess heard of it in her quarters among the hills. It flew east to another duchess on the lowland side. Of course I need not say to people who know the country which was the one duchess and which the other. In the course of time they both called, which was a prodigious distinction: and so did all the smaller gentry, and some of those great Glasgow potentates who build themselves new castles upon the banks of the Clyde. Some of them were very fine gentlemen indeed, but they were “mixed,” and some were only “Glasgow builders” of a kind quite unknown to Evelyn. One whose carriage would have made a sensation in Hyde Park, even in the days of hammercloth, with two powdered footmen behind, had the manners still of the blacksmith he had originally been. Mr. Rowland rather liked these personages, especially the old gentleman who had been a blacksmith. He stood up in a group with two or three of them who represented among them heaven knows how many millions, and thrust his hands into his pockets and talked investments and money. Why should not people talk money who have more of that than of anything else? Painters talk of their pictures, and literary men of their books. Why not millionaires of that which makes them so? Rowland was very intelligent, and he liked to talk upon money subjects; but an occasional laying of the heads together with a few other rich men over the subject of money was refreshing to him, as it is refreshing to an artist after long deprivation to find himself once more among his own kind.