She had a disturbed night, full of alarm and much planning and thinking, sitting up till it was almost daylight, in terror that the visit which she had been so foolish as to invite might be paid at any unlawful hour. And when the next morning came, it was apparent to her that she must do something at once to provide against such a danger, to save herself from the consequences of her foolishness. How it had been that an adventuress like this had managed to secure for her daughter the most respectable of marriages in respectable Edinburgh, is a question into which I cannot enter. It had not been, indeed, Mrs Ainslie’s doing at all. The girl, who knew none of her mother’s disreputable secrets, had made acquaintance in a foreign hotel with some girls of her own age, who had afterwards invited her to visit them in Edinburgh. Such things are done every day, and come to harm so seldom that it is scarcely worth taking the adverse chances into consideration. And there, in the shelter of a most respectable family, the most respectable of men had fallen in love with Sophie. It was all so rapid that examination into the position of the Ainslies was impossible. Sophie had no money: her father had been killed in some campaign in India which happened to coincide with the date of her birth. She was pretty, and not anything but good so far as her up-bringing had permitted. I give this brief sketch in hot haste, as indeed the matter was done--for Mrs Ainslie had announced that she had only come to Eskholm for a few weeks, and was going “abroad” again immediately. Perhaps it was the acquisition of a son-in-law so absolutely correct as Mr Thomas Blair--dear Tom, as his mother-in-law always called him--that put into her head the possibility of becoming herself an exceptionable member of society, furnished with all possible certificates by marrying Mr Logan. At all events, it was her son-in-law to whom she now betook herself after many thoughts, with that skill of the long-experienced schemer which is capable of using truth as an instrument often more effectual than falsehood. She went to him (he was a lawyer) with all the candour of a woman who has made, with grief for her neighbour, a dreadful discovery, and who in the interests of her neighbour, not in her own--for what could she have to do with anything so wicked and terrible?--thinks it necessary to reveal what she has seen. In this way she made Mr Blair aware of the circumstances of her visit at the Hewan, and the man she had seen there. She told him that she had been present at the trial of this man in America--it was one of her frank and simple statements, which were so perfectly candid and above board, that she had lived in various parts of America after her husband’s death--for various terrible crimes. She had seen him in court for days together, and could not be mistaken in him: and the idea that so excellent a person as Mrs Ogilvy had such a man in her house was too dreadful to think of.