Next day a messenger called at the house of Mary’s father, and requested to see her. He was commissioned, he said, to give her—provided she would receive it with grace and favour—renouncing the ill-will she bore to Ashley—a considerable sum of money, amounting to two hundred merks. Contrary to the man’s own expectation, the girl seized the money with the greatest avidity; but without uttering a syllable wherefrom he might draw an inference that she was placated in any degree by the gift. As soon as he retired, she locked the money in her trunk, apostrophising the despised and worshipped dust, with the spirit of an enraptured Mammon—“Lie there till vengeance needs ye.” Time rolled on without producing any change on Mary Lee. At “The Castle,” things were different. The old man died, and Robert succeeded to the estates. He gradually softened down to the condition of a sober-minded husband, and experienced the ordinary effects of early ribaldry and dissipation, in a deep, heart-felt regret, and a wish to make amends to heaven and earth for an abuse of the gifts of both. He had one son, whose name was Hector, whom he loved with all the devotion of a father. Being an only son, the boy was, as usual, spoiled, both by his father and mother; having concentrated on himself affections which, in other circumstances, might have been, with advantage to parents and child, spread over a family of sons and daughters. To such an extent was affection carried, in the case of this spoiled child, that the mother would scarcely let him out of her sight. With his heart also garnered up in his son, and happy in the possession of a kind, gentle, though constitutionally weak wife, Robert Ashley might have been pronounced as happy as the regret produced by the loss of the best part of his life would permit him to be.