of his "forbears" had lived and died.

Sir Alick was six-and-twenty, and it was therefore fully time that he
should marry and carry on the traditions of the house, and, as the
Glenlivet's fortune did not match their "long pedigree," it was
distinctly an advantage that the newly-wedded bride was so well dowered.
But then, on the other hand, Mistress Mary Wilkinson was an
Englishwoman, and Lady Glenlivet more than suspected the fact (adroitly
veiled in her son's letter) that the young lady's fortune had been made
in trade.

Sir Alick Glenlivet, visiting London for the first time in his life, had
been hospitably entertained by a distant kinsman, a Scotch lawyer, who
had settled in the English metropolis; and at his house had met with the
orphan heiress of a substantial city trader, to whom Simon Glenlivet was
guardian. To Alick, bred up in the comparative seclusion and obscurity
of his Scottish home, the plunge into London life was as bewildering as
delightful; and he soon thought sweet Mary Wilkinson, with her soft blue
eyes and gentle voice, the fairest creature his eyes had ever rested
upon; while to Mary, the handsome young Scotchman was like the hero in a
Border tale.

"Happy the wooing that's not long a-doing." Mistress Mary was
twenty-two, so of legal age to please herself in her choice of a
husband; while Simon Glenlivet was still sufficiently a Scotchman at
heart to consider an alliance with the "ancient and noble family" with
which he himself claimed kinship an advantage which might fairly
outbalance his lack of fortune.

To do the young man justice, Mary's wealth counted for nothing in his
choice; he would as readily have married her had the fortune been all on
his side. Indeed, it was with some qualms of conscience that Sir Alick
now wrote to inform his mother of the sudden step which he had taken;
half fearing that, in the eyes of the proud old Scotch dame, even Mary's
beauty and fortune could scarcely compensate for her lack of "long
descent."

And indeed, Lady Glenlivet's Highland pride was not at all well pleased
to learn that her son had wedded a trader's daughter; though Mary (or
Maisie, as her husband now called her) had received the education of a
refined gentlewoman, and was far more well bred and accomplished than
were the two tall, awkward daughters of the Glenlivet household; or, for
the matter of that, than was the "auld leddy hersel'."

Lady Glenlivet, however, loved her son, and stifled do