His remittances, it was also ascertained, came to him, from whatever quarter it might be, regularly twice a-year, per the English mail, which passed within a mile and a half of West Mains. The exact amount of these remittances, which were always in gold, and put up in a small, neat, tight parcel, was never exactly known; but was supposed, on pretty good grounds, to be, each, somewhere about a hundred and fifty guineas, one of which went to Mr Adair; for Mr Mowbray had, of his own accord, added fifty guineas per annum to the hundred which he had first promised. The other hundred and fifty was disposed of in various ways, or left to accumulate with their owner. Such, then, was the amount of information acquired regarding Mr Mowbray's pecuniary resources; and more, on this point, or any other regarding him, could not, by any means, be arrived at. By the end of the period, however, which we have above named--namely, two years--public opinion had, we must observe, undergone a considerable modification in Mr Mowbray's favour. He had been gradually acquitted of his various crimes; and the worst that was now believed of him was, that he was a gentleman whom troubles, of some kind or other, had driven from the world. This favourable change in public opinion regarding him was, in a great measure, if not, indeed, wholly owing to the regularity of his conduct, the gentleness of his manners, his generosity--for he was a liberal contributor to the relief of the necessitous poor in his vicinity--and to the rigid punctuality he observed in all his pecuniary transactions. In the family in which he resided, where there were, of course, better opportunities for judging of his character, and estimating his good qualities, he came to be much beloved. Adair, as he often said himself, would "gae through fire and water to serve him;" for a more honourable, or "discreet" young gentleman, as he also frequently said, "didna breathe the breath o' existence." On every other member of the family, the impression he made was equally favourable; and, on one of them, in particular, we might speak of it in yet stronger language. But of this anon. The general conviction into which the family with which Mr Mowbray resided fell, regarding the personal history of that person, was, that he was a gentleman who possessed a moderate annuity from some fixed sum, and that some disgust with the world had driven him into his present retirement; and in this conviction they had now been so long and so completely settled, that they firmly believed in its truth, and never after dreamed of again agitating the question, even in the most distant manner. Thus, then, stood matters at West Mains at the end of two years from the period at which our story opens. Hitherto, however, we have only exhibited what was passing above board. We will now give the reader a peep of certain little matters that were going on behind the scenes.