On all sides kine were lowing; overhead rooks were cawing; the sun
was nearing the west, and in the hollows a thin mist came steaming
up. Malcolm had never in his life been so far from the coast before:
his road led southwards into the heart of the country.
The father of the late proprietor of Kirkbyres had married the
heiress of Gersefell, an estate which marched with his own, and
was double its size, whence the lairdship was sometimes spoken of
by the one name, sometimes by the other. The combined properties
thus inherited by the late Mr Stewart were of sufficient extent to
justify him, although a plain man, in becoming a suitor for the hand
of the beautiful daughter of a needy baronet in the neighbourhood
--with the already somewhat tarnished condition of whose reputation,
having come into little contact with the world in which she moved,
he was unacquainted. Quite unexpectedly she also, some years after
their marriage, brought him a property of considerable extent, a
fact which doubtless had its share in the birth and nourishment of
her consuming desire to get the estates into her own management.
Towards the end of his journey, Malcolm came upon a bare moorland
waste, on the long ascent of a low hill,--very desolate, with not
a tree or house within sight for two miles. A ditch, half full of
dark water, bordered each side of the road, which went straight as
a rod through a black peat moss lying cheerless and dreary on all
sides--hardly less so where the sun gleamed from the surface of
some stagnant pool filling a hole whence peats had been dug, or
where a patch of cotton grass waved white and lonely in the midst
of the waste expanse.
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