n ordinary for "the poor young
gentleman's dinner;" to exert her interest with those who remembered
her husband, or loved her for her own sake and his, in order to procure
scarce vegetables, or something which her simplicity supposed might
tempt her lodger's appetite, was a labour in which she delighted,
although she anxiously concealed it from the person who was its object.
She did not adopt this secrecy of benevolence to avoid the laugh of
those who might suppose that an oval face and dark eyes, with a clear
brown complexion, though belonging to a woman of five-and-forty, and
enclosed within a widow's close-drawn pinners, might possibly still
aim at making conquests; for, to say truth, such a ridiculous suspicion
having never entered into her own head, she could not anticipate its
having birth in that of any one else. But she concealed her attentions
solely out of delicacy to her guest, whose power of repaying them she
doubted as much as she believed in his inclination to do so, and in
his being likely to feel extreme pain at leaving any of her civilities
unrequited. She now opened the door to Mr. Oldbuck, and her surprise at
seeing him brought tears into her eyes, which she could hardly restrain.

"I am glad to see you, sir--I am very glad to see you. My poor gentleman
is, I am afraid, very unwell; and oh, Mr. Oldbuck, he'll see neither
doctor, nor minister, nor writer! And think what it would be, if, as
my poor Mr. Hadoway used to say, a man was to die without advice of the
three learned faculties!"

"Greatly better than with them," grumbled the cynical Antiquary. "I tell
you, Mrs. Hadoway, the clergy live by our sins, the medical faculty by
our diseases, and the law gentry by our misfortunes."

"O fie, Monkbarns!--to hear the like o' that frae you!--But yell walk up
and see the poor young lad?--Hegh sirs? sae young and weel-favoured--and
day by day he has eat less and less, and now he hardly touches onything,
only just pits a bit on the plate to make fashion--and his poor cheek has
turned every day thinner and paler, sae that he now really looks as auld
as me, that might be his mother--no that I might be just that neither,
but something very near it."

"Why does he not take some exercise?" said Oldbuck.

"I think we have persuaded him to do that, for he has bought a horse
from Gibbie Golightly, the galloping groom. A gude judge o' horse-flesh
Gibbie tauld our lass that he was--for he offered him a beast he thou