ated among the three misses
like a thing of weight. One way with another, no doubt I was a good deal
improved to look at, and acquired a bit of a modish air that would have
surprised the good folks at Essendean.

The two younger misses were very willing to discuss a point of my
habiliment, because that was in the line of their chief thoughts. I
cannot say that they appeared any other way conscious of my presence;
and though always more than civil, with a kind of heartless cordiality,
could not hide how much I wearied them. As for the aunt, she was a
wonderful still woman; and I think she gave me much the same attention
as she gave the rest of the family, which was little enough. The eldest
daughter and the Advocate himself were thus my principal friends, and
our familiarity was much increased by a pleasure that we took in common.
Before the court met we spent a day or two at the house of Grange,
living very nobly with an open table, and here it was that we three
began to ride out together in the fields, a practice afterwards
maintained in Edinburgh, so far as the Advocate's continual affairs
permitted. When we were put in a good frame by the briskness of the
exercise, the difficulties of the way, or the accidents of bad weather,
my shyness wore entirely off; we forgot that we were strangers, and
speech not being required, it flowed the more naturally on. Then it was
that they had my story from me, bit by bit, from the time that I left
Essendean, with my voyage and battle in the _Covenant_, wanderings in
the heather, etc.; and from the interest they found in my adventures
sprung the circumstance of a jaunt we made a little later on, a day when
the courts were not sitting, and of which I will tell a trifle more at
length.

We took horse early, and passed first by the house of Shaws, where it
stood smokeless in a great field of white frost, for it was yet early in
the day. Here Prestongrange alighted down, gave me his horse, and
proceeded alone to visit my uncle. My heart, I remember, swelled up
bitter within me at the sight of that bare house and the thought of the
old miser sitting chittering within in the cold kitchen.

"There is my home," said I. "And my family."

"Poor David Balfour!" said Miss Grant.

What passed during the visit I have never heard; but it would doubtless
not be very agreeable to Ebenezer; for when the Advocate came forth
again his face was dark.

"I think you will soon be the laird indeed, Mr