ason with Mr. Henry; he gave
what was asked of him in a kind of noble rage. Perhaps because he knew
he was by nature inclining to the parsimonious, he took a backforemost
pleasure in the recklessness with which he supplied his brother's
exigence. Perhaps the falsity of the position would have spurred a
humbler man into the same excess. But the estate (if I may say so)
groaned under it; our daily expenses were shorn lower and lower; the
stables were emptied, all but four roadsters; servants were discharged,
which raised a dreadful murmuring in the country, and heated up the old
disfavour upon Mr. Henry; and at last the yearly visit to Edinburgh must
be discontinued.

This was in 1756. You are to suppose that for seven years this
bloodsucker had been drawing the life's blood from Durrisdeer, and that
all this time my patron had held his peace. It was an effect of devilish
malice in the Master that he addressed Mr. Henry alone upon the matter
of his demands, and there was never a word to my lord. The family had
looked on, wondering at our economies. They had lamented, I have no
doubt, that my patron had become so great a miser--a fault always
despicable, but in the young abhorrent, and Mr. Henry was not yet thirty
years of age. Still, he had managed the business of Durrisdeer almost
from a boy; and they bore with these changes in a silence as proud and
bitter as his own, until the coping-stone of the Edinburgh visit.

At this time I believe my patron and his wife were rarely together, save
at meals. Immediately on the back of Colonel Burke's announcement Mrs.
Henry made palpable advances; you might say she had laid a sort of timid
court to her husband, different, indeed, from her former manner of
unconcern and distance. I never had the heart to blame Mr. Henry because
he recoiled from these advances; nor yet to censure the wife, when she
was cut to the quick by their rejection. But the result was an entire
estrangement, so that (as I say) they rarely spoke, except at meals.
Even the matter of the Edinburgh visit was first broached at table, and
it chanced that Mrs. Henry was that day ailing and querulous. She had no
sooner understood her husband's meaning than the red flew in her face.

"At last," she cried, "this is too much! Heaven knows what pleasure I
have in my life, that I should be denied my only consolation. These
shameful proclivities must be trod down; we are already a mark and an
eye-sore in the neighbourhood.