“No.  Mhor is ‘a’body’s body.’  He will never lack for admirers.  But Jock is my own boy.  We’ve been friends since he came home from India, a white-headed baby with the same surprised blue eyes that he has now.  He was never out of scrapes at home, but he was always good with me.  I suppose I was flattered by that.”

“Jock,” said Jean, “is very nearly the nicest thing in the world, and the funniest.  This morning Mrs. M’Cosh caught a mouse alive in a trap, and Jock, while dressing, heard her say she would drown it.  Down he went, like an avalanche in pyjamas, drove Mrs. M’Cosh into the scullery, and let the mouse away in the garden.  He would fight any number of boys of any size for an ill-treated animal.  In fact, all his tenderness is given to dumb animals.  He has no real liking for mortals.  They affront him with their love-making and their marriages.  He has to leave the room when anything bordering on sentiment is read aloud.  ‘Tripe,’ he calls it in his low way. Do you remember his scorn of knight-errants who rescued distressed damsels?  They seemed to him so little worth rescuing.”

“I never cared much for sentiment myself,” said Mrs. Hope.  “I wouldn’t give a good adventure yarn for all the love-stories ever written.”

“Mother remains very boyish,” said Augusta.  “She likes something vivid in the way of crime.”

“And now,” said her mother, “you are laughing at an old done woman, which is very unseemly.  Come and sit beside me, Miss Reston, and tell me what you think of Priorsford.”

“Oh,” said Pamela, drawing a low chair to the side of her hostess, “it’s not for me to talk about Priorsford.  They tell me you know more about it than anyone.”

“Do I?  Well, perhaps; anyway, I love it more than most.  I’ve lived here practically all my life, and my forbears have been in the countryside for generations, and that all counts.  Priorsford ...  I sometimes stand on the bridge and look and look, and tell myself that I feel like a mother to it.”

“I know,” said Pamela.  “There is something very appealing about a little town:  I never lived in one before.”

“But,” said Mrs. Hope, jealous as a mother for her own, “I think there is something very special about Priorsford.  There are few towns as beautiful.  The way the hills cradle it, and Peel Tower stands guard over it, and the links of Tweed water it, and even the streets aren’t ordinary, they have such lovely glimpses.  From the East Gate you look up to the East Law, pine trees, grey walls, green terraces; in the Highgate you don’t go many yards without coming to a pend with a view of blue distances that takes your breath, just as in Edinburgh when you look down an alley and see ships tacking for the Baltic....  But I wish I had known Priorsford as it was in my mother’s young days, when the French prisoners were here.  The genteel supper-parties and assemblies must have been vastly entertaining.  It has changed even in my day.  I don’t want to repeat the old folks’ litany, ‘No times like the old times,’ but it does seem to me—­or is it only distance lending enchantment?—­that the people I used to know were more human, more interesting; there was less worship of money, less running after the great ones of the earth, certainly less vulgarity.  We were content with less, and happier.”