ff-Whalley.

CHAPTER XX

"Marvell, who had both pleasure and success, who must have enjoyed
life if ever man did, ... found his happiness in the garden where he
was."--From an article in _The Times Literary Supplement._

Mrs. M'Cosh remained extremely sceptical about the reality of the
fortune until the lawyer came from London, "yin's errand to see Miss
Jean," as she explained importantly to Miss Bathgate, and he was such an
eminently solid, safe-looking man that her doubts vanished.

"I wud say he wis an elder in the kirk, if they've onything as
respectable as an elder in England," was her summing up of the lawyer.

Mr. Dickson (of Dickson, Staines, & Dickson), though a lawyer, was a
human being, and was able to meet Jean with sympathy and understanding
when she tried to explain to him her wishes.

First of all, she was very anxious to know if Mr. Dickson thought it
quite fair that she should have the money. Was he _quite_ sure that
there were no relations, no one who had a real claim?

Mr. Dickson explained to her what a singularly lonely, self-sufficing
man Peter Reid had been, a man without friends, almost without
interests--except the piling up of money.

"I don't say he was unhappy; I believe he was very content, absolutely
absorbed in his game of money-making. But when he couldn't ignore any
longer the fact that there was something wrong with his health, and went
to the specialist and was told to give up work at once, he was
completely bowled over. Life held nothing more for him. I was very sorry
for the poor man ... he had only one thought--to go back to Priorsford,
his boyhood's home."

"And I didn't know," said Jean, "or we would all have turned out there
and then and sat on our boxes in the middle of the road, or roosted in
the trees like crows, rather than keep him for an hour out of his own
house. He came and asked to see The Rigs and I was afraid he meant to
buy it: it was always our nightmare that the landlord in London would
turn us out.... He looked frail and shabby, and I jumped to the
conclusion that he was poor. Oh, I do wish I had known...."

"He told me," Mr. Dickson went on, "when he came to see me on his
return, that he had come with the intention of asking the tenants to
leave The Rigs, but that he hadn't the heart to do it when he saw how
attached you were to the place. He added that you had been kind to him.
He was rather gruff and ashamed about his weakness, but