be offered, in
ungrudging and ready sacrifice. This was eminently the case with Lucy
Ashton. Her politic, wary, and wordly father felt for her an affection
the strength of which sometimes surprised him into an unusual emotion.
Her elder brother, who trode the path of ambition with a haughtier step
than his father, had also more of human affection. A soldier, and in
a dissolute age, he preferred his sister Lucy even to pleasure and to
military preferment and distinction. Her younger brother, at an age when
trifles chiefly occupied his mind, made her the confidante of all his
pleasures and anxieties, his success in field-sports, and his quarrels
with his tutor and instructors. To these details, however trivial, Lucy
lent patient and not indifferent attention. They moved and interested
Henry, and that was enough to secure her ear.

Her mother alone did not feel that distinguished and predominating
affection with which the rest of the family cherished Lucy. She regarded
what she termed her daughter's want of spirit as a decided mark that the
more plebeian blood of her father predominated in Lucy's veins, and used
to call her in derision her Lammermoor Shepherdess. To dislike so gentle
and inoffensive a being was impossible; but Lady Ashton preferred her
eldest son, on whom had descended a large portion of her own ambitious
and undaunted disposition, to a daughter whose softness of temper seemed
allied to feebleness of mind. Her eldest son was the more partially
beloved by his mother because, contrary to the usual custom of Scottish
families of distinction, he had been named after the head of the house.

"My Sholto," she said, "will support the untarnished honour of his
maternal house, and elevate and support that of his father. Poor Lucy
is unfit for courts or crowded halls. Some country laird must be her
husband, rich enough to supply her with every comfort, without an effort
on her own part, so that she may have nothing to shed a tear for but the
tender apprehension lest he may break his neck in a foxchase. It was
not so, however, that our house was raised, nor is it so that it can be
fortified and augmented. The Lord Keeper's dignity is yet new; it must
be borne as if we were used to its weight, worthy of it, and prompt
to assert and maintain it. Before ancient authorities men bend from
customary and hereditary deference; in our presence they will stand
erect, unless they are compelled to prostrate themselves. A daughte