next day he applied to Chancery for a brieve to get Charles Napier
served nearest and lawful heir to his uncle; and as in legal warfare,
where the judges are cognisant only of patent claims, there is small
room for retiring tactics, Mr. White felt himself obliged, however
anxious he was to gain time, to follow his opponent's example by taking
out a competing brieve in favour of Henrietta.

The parties were now face to face in court, and the battle behoved to be
fought out; but as in all legal cases, where the circumstances are
strange or peculiar, the story soon gets wind, so here the Meggat's Land
romance was by-and-by all over the city. Nor did it take less fantastic
forms than usual, where sympathies and antipathies are strong in
proportion to the paucity of the facts on which they are fed. It was a
favourite opinion of some, that the case could only be cleared by
supposing that a dead stranger child had been surreptitiously passed
off, and even coffined, as the true one; while others, equally skilled
in the art of divining, maintained that the child given to Mrs. Hislop
by Cowie was a bastard of his own, by the terrible woman Isabel Napier,
who was thus, according to the ordinary working of public prejudice,
raised to a height of crime sufficient to justify the hatred of the
people: on which presumption, it behoved to be assumed that the paper
containing the curse was a forgery by Cowie and his associate in crime,
and that the money paid to Mrs. Hislop was furnished by the lady; all
which suppositions, and others not less incredible, were greedily
accepted, for the very reason that it required something prodigious to
explain an enigma which exhausted the ordinary sources of man's
ingenuity; just as we find in many religions, where miracles--the more
absurd, the more acceptable--are resorted to to explain the mystery of
man's relation to God, a secret which no natural light can illuminate.