'Captain Colville, of the Household Brigade, and Sir Redmond Sleath, a baronet, and wealthy, I believe, friends of the Dunkeld family, come here for the Twelfth. Are you pleased with them?'
'Oh, yes,' replied Ellinor, but Mary remained silent.
'Perhaps one may prove like the hunter who came in the olden time to hunt here, and wooed the pretty maid of Forteviot,' said the doctor, laughing, and pinching her soft cheek.
'And Captain Colville is engaged to Blanche Galloway, is he not?' she asked.
'So I believe. A man of undoubted wealth, he has lately succeeded to property of various kinds, and means, it is said, to urge his claim in the female line to the peerage of Ochiltree, which has been dormant since the death of David, fourth lord, in 1782. He has thus assumed the name of Colville.'
'Lord Colville of Ochiltree,' said Mary, softly and thoughtfully.
'Yes—he claims that peerage, my dear,' replied Dr. Wodrow. 'I have a great and melancholy respect for our dormant, extinct, and—more than all—for our attainted peerages. The men who held them were generally, if not all, true to Scotland, which is more than we can say for our mongrel and often cockney-born peers of the present day; but Captain Colville would be one, good, honest, and true, I doubt not.'
'And his own name?'
'I do not precisely know,' replied the minister, whose son listened to all this with a lowering brow, but lingered a little behind his father, and, while the latter was striding along the green lanes towards the manse, Robert was telling Ellinor over again of all his hopes and plans, and his expectation of certainly graduating in medicine at Edinburgh, and that he would get his diploma very shortly; and then—and then—what then?
A kiss given in secret seemed more than a reward for all his labours and consumption of the midnight oil in a lonely lodging up a common stair near the old 'Academia Jacobi VI. Scotorum Regis,' and where he had pored for many a weary hour over 'Quain's Anatomy,' 'Christison's Dispensatory,' 'Balfour's Botany,' and so forth, inspired by his love for Ellinor Wellwood, and now he left her, with his heart full of happy dreams of the future.