n what these failings ever must bring, and evil times fell on
that house. Piece by piece, one after the other, the ancient possessions
passed away from their former owners, sacrificed to gratify some passing
whim or to pay some foolishly contracted debt, till, finally, the house
itself and what land remained had also been flung into the melting-pot,
and the last male heir of the old line, with his only child, a daughter,
sat homeless in their old home, awaiting the hour which should bring
with it the new owner, and to them the sorrow of for ever quitting
scenes dear to them from infancy.

By the dying embers of a wood fire they two lingered one December night,
wrapped in no pleasant thoughts, and idly listening to the shrill
piping of a wind that dismally foretold the coming of snow. The father
was a man well advanced in life, on whose good-looking, weak face
dissipation had set its seal; the daughter, a woman of six or seven and
twenty, who preserved more than all her father's good looks, but--as is
so often the case in the females of a decadent family--who, in her
expression, showed no trace of weakness. Indeed, if a fault could be
found in face or figure, it was that the former for a woman told of too
much firmness and resolution, qualities which circumstances might very
readily develop into obstinacy, and even into cruelty. Her mother had
died when Helen was but an infant, and thus it chanced that, as a child,
her upbringing had been left pretty well to nature, aided (or perhaps
hampered) only by the foolish indulgence of an ignorant and not very
high-principled nurse, in whom fidelity was perhaps the only virtue, and
who now, in her old age, almost alone of a once large staff of servants,
still clung to "her bairn," and to the fallen fortunes of her master. Of
education the child received but what little she chose to receive, and
of discipline she knew nothing, for to the hopelessly weak father her
will had too soon become law.

Naturally, Helen grew up headstrong and self-indulgent, recognising no
rule but that of her own inclinations, and before her eighteenth
birthday she had, without the knowledge of her father, engaged herself
to a penniless youth of good family, the younger son of a neighbour. An
entire lack of funds, however, seemed--at least to the lad--sufficient
cause for delaying the marriage, and "to mak' the croon a pound," he
went, not "to sea," but (as was then not uncommon with young Scotsmen)
to t