had brought in with him from his study, in which he was tracing out some
genealogical thread of which he fancied he had got a hold. Mysie was
very active now, and lost the expression of far-off-ness which had
hitherto characterized her countenance; till, having poured out the tea,
she too plunged at once into her novel, and, like her father, forgot
everything and everybody near her.

Mr. Lindsay was a mild, gentle man, whose face and hair seemed to have
grown gray together. He was very tall, and stooped much. He had a mouth
of much sensibility, and clear blue eyes, whose light was rarely shed
upon any one within reach except his daughter--they were so constantly
bent downwards, either on the road as he walked, or on his book as he
sat. He had been educated for the church, but had never risen above
the position of a parish school-master. He had little or no impulse to
utterance, was shy, genial, and, save in reading, indolent. Ten years
before this point of my history he had been taken up by an active lawyer
in Edinburgh, from information accidentally supplied by Mr. Lindsay
himself, as the next heir to a property to which claim was laid by the
head of a county family of wealth. Probabilities were altogether in
his favour, when he gave up the contest upon the offer of a comfortable
annuity from the disputant. To leave his schooling and his possible
estate together, and sit down comfortably by his own fireside, with the
means of buying books, and within reach of a good old library--that
of King's College by preference--was to him the sum of all that was
desirable. The income offered him was such that he had no doubt
of laying aside enough for his only child, Mysie; but both were so
ill-fitted for saving, he from looking into the past, she from looking
into--what shall I call it? I can only think of negatives--what was
neither past, present, nor future, neither material nor eternal, neither
imaginative in any true sense, nor actual in any sense, that up to
the present hour there was nothing in the bank, and only the money for
impending needs in the house. He could not be called a man of learning;
he was only a great bookworm; for his reading lay all in the nebulous
regions of history. Old family records, wherever he could lay hold upon
them, were his favourite dishes; old, musty books, that looked as if
they knew something everybody else had forgotten, made his eyes gleam,
and his white taper-fingered hand tremble with eag