much
        when you want it. With you it may do good - with me it never can.
            Write to me soon, Jeanie, or I shall remain in the agonising
        apprehension that this has fallen into wrong hands - Address simply to
        L.S., under cover, to the Reverend George White-rose, in the
        Minster-Close, York. He thinks I correspond with some of my noble
        Jacobite relations who are in Scotland. How high-church and jacobitical
        zeal would burn in his cheeks, if he knew he was the agent, not of
        Euphemia Setoun, of the honourable house of Winton, but of E.D.,
        daughter of a Cameronian cowfeeder! - Jeanie, I can laugh yet sometimes
        - but God protect you from such mirth. - My father - I mean your father,
        would say it was like the idle crackling of thorns; but the thorns keep
        their poignancy, they remain unconsumed. Farewell, my dearest Jeanie -
        Do not show this even to Mr. Butler, much less to any one else. I have
        every respect for him, but his principles are over strict, and my case
        will not endure severe handling. - I rest your affectionate sister, E.«
 
In this long letter there was much to surprise as well as to distress Mrs.
Butler. That Effie - her sister Effie, should be mingling freely in society, and
apparently on not unequal terms, with the Duke of Argyle, sounded like something
so extraordinary, that she even doubted if she read truly. Nor was it less
marvellous, that, in the space of four years, her education should have made
such progress. Jeanie's humility readily allowed that Effie had always, when she
chose it, been smarter at her book than she herself was, but then she was very
idle, and, upon the whole, had made much less proficiency. Love, or fear, or
necessity, however, had proved an able schoolmistress, and completely supplied
all her deficiencies.
    What Jeanie least liked in the tone of the letter, was a smothered degree of
egotism. »We should have heard little about her,« said Jeanie to herself, »but
that she was feared the Duke might come to learn wha she was, and a' about her
puir friends here; but Effie, puir thing, aye looks her ain way, and folk that
do that think mair o' themselves than of their neighbours. - I am no clear about
keeping her siller,« she added, taking up a £50 note which had fallen out of the
paper to the floor