One Sunday, about two years before his call to the bar, Scott offered his umbrella to a young lady of much beauty who was coming out of the Greyfriars Church during a shower; the umbrella was graciously accepted; and it was not an unprecedented consequence that Scott fell in love with the borrower, who turned out to be Margaret, daughter of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart Belches, of Invernay.  For near six years after this, Scott indulged the hope of marrying this lady, and it does not seem doubtful that the lady herself was in part responsible for this impression.  Scott’s father, who thought his son’s prospects very inferior to those of Miss Stuart Belches, felt it his duty to warn the baronet of his son’s views, a warning which the old gentleman appears to have received with that grand unconcern characteristic of elderly persons in high position, as a hint intrinsically incredible, or at least unworthy of notice.  But he took no alarm, and Scott’s attentions to Margaret Stuart Belches continued till close on the eve of her marriage, in 1796, to William Forbes (afterwards Sir William Forbes), of Pitsligo, a banker, who proved to be one of Sir Walter’s most generous and most delicate-minded friends, when his time of troubles came towards the end of both their lives.  Whether Scott was in part mistaken as to the impression he had made on the young lady, or she was mistaken as to the impression he had made on herself, or whether other circumstances intervened to cause misunderstanding, or the grand indifference of Sir John gave way to active intervention when the question became a practical one, the world will now never know, but it does not seem very likely that a man of so much force as Scott, who certainly had at one time assured himself at least of the young lady’s strong regard, should have been easily displaced even by a rival of ability and of most generous and amiable character.  An entry in the diary which Scott kept in 1827, after Constable’s and Ballantyne’s failure, and his wife’s death, seems to me to suggest that there may have been some misunderstanding between the young people, though I am not sure that the inference is justified.  The passage completes the story of this passion—­Scott’s first and only deep passion—­so far as it can ever be known to us; and as it is a very pathetic and characteristic entry, and the attachment to which it refers had a great influence on Scott’s life, both in keeping him free from some of the most dangerous temptations of the young, during his youth, and in creating within him an interior world of dreams and recollections throughout his whole life, on which his imaginative nature was continually fed—­I may as well give it.  “He had taken,” says Mr. Lockhart, “for that winter [1827], the house No. 6, Shandwick Place, which he occupied by the month during the remainder of his servitude as a clerk of session.  Very near this house, he was told a few days after he took possession, dwelt the aged mother of his first love; and he expressed