declare her illegitimate, seeing that, unknown to the marquis, the
youth's mother, his first wife, was still alive when Florimel was
born. How to act so that as little evil as possible might befall
the favourite of his father, and one whom he had himself loved with
the devotion almost of a dog, before he knew she was his sister,
was the main problem.

For himself, he had had a rough education, and had enjoyed it: his
thoughts were not troubled about his own prospects. Mysteriously
committed to the care of a poor blind Highland piper, a stranger
from inland regions, settled amongst a fishing people, he had, as
he grew up, naturally fallen into their ways of life and labour,
and but lately abandoned the calling of a fisherman to take charge
of the marquis's yacht, whence, by degrees, he had, in his helpfulness,
grown indispensable to him and his daughter, and had come to live
in the house of Lossie as a privileged servant. His book education,
which he owed mainly to the friendship of the parish schoolmaster,
although nothing marvellous, or in Scotland very peculiar, had
opened for him in all directions doors of thought and inquiry, but
the desire of knowledge was in his case, again through the influences
of Mr Graham, subservient to an almost restless yearning after
the truth of things, a passion so rare that the ordinary mind can
hardly master even the fact of its existence.

The Marchioness of Lossie, as she was now called, for the family
was one of the two or three in Scotland in which the title descends
to an heiress, had left Lossie House almost immediately upon her
father's death, under the guardianship of a certain dowager countess.
Lady Bellair had taken her first to Edinburgh, and then to London.
Tidings of her Malcolm occasionally received through Mr Soutar of