Greatorix Castle sat mightily upon a hill.  It could not be hid, and it looked down superciliously upon the little squiredom of Craig Ronald, as well as upon farms and cottages a many.  In days not so long gone by, Greatorix Castle had been the hold of the wearers of the White Cockade, rough riders after Lag and Sir James Dalzyell, and rebels after that, who had held with Derwentwater and the prince.  Now there was quiet there.  Only the Lady Elizabeth and her son Agnew Greatorix dwelt there, and the farmer’s cow and the cottager’s pig grazed and rooted unharmed—­not always, however, it was whispered, the farmer’s daughter, for of all serfdoms the droit du seignior is the last to die.  Still, Greatorix Castle was a notable place, high set on its hill, shires and towns beneath, the blue breath of peat reek blowing athwart the plain beneath and rising like an incense about.

Here the Lady Elizabeth dwelt in solemn but greatly reduced state.  She was a woman devoted to the practice of holiness according to the way of the priest.  It was the whole wish of her life that she might keep a spiritual director, instead of having Father Mahon to ride over from Dumfries once a month.

Within the castle there were many signs of decay—­none of rehabilitation.  The carpets were worn into holes where feet had oftenest fallen, and the few servants dared not take them out to be beaten in the due season of the year, for indubitably they would fall to pieces.  So the curtains hung till an unwary stranger would rest upon them with a hand’s weight.  Then that hand plucked a palmbreadth away of the rotten and moth-eaten fabric.

There was an aged housekeeper at Greatorix Castle, who dwelt in the next room to the Lady Elizabeth, and was supposed to act as her maid.  Mistress Humbie, however, was an exacting person; and being an aged woman, and her infirmities bearing upon her, she considered it more fitting that the Lady Elizabeth should wait upon her.  This, for the good of her soul, the Lady Elizabeth did.  Two maids and a boy, a demon boy, in buttons, who dwelt below-stairs and gave his time to the killing of rats with ingenious catapults and crossbows, completed the household—­except Agnew Greatorix.

The exception was a notable one.  Save in the matter of fortune, Nature had not dealt unhandsomely with Agnew Greatorix; yet just because of this his chances of growing up into a strong and useful man were few.  He had been nurtured upon expectations from his earliest youth.  His uncle Agnew, the Lady Elizabeth’s childless brother, who for the sake of the favour of a strongly Protestant aunt had left the mother church of the Greatorix family, had been expected to do something for Agnew; but up to this present time he had received only his name from him, in lieu of all the stately heritages of Holywood in the Nith Valley hard by Lincluden, and Stennesholm in Carrick.