This was the only shape in which love had come near the door of Drumcarro, and if there was a certain attraction even in the tragic mystery of the tale, there was not much encouragement for the others to follow Anne’s example, thus banished summarily and for ever from all relations with her family. Also from that time no doctor except the old man who had brought the children into the world was ever allowed to enter those sacred doors, nor any minister younger or more seductive than Mr. Pyper. As for other ineligible persons there were none in the country-side, so that Mary and Kirsteen were safe from temptation. And thus they went on from day to day and from year to year, in a complete isolation which poverty made imperative more even than circumstances, the only event that ever happened being the departure of a brother, or an unusually severe “attack” of their mother’s continued ever-enduring illness. They were not sufficiently educated nor sufficiently endowed to put them on a par with the few high-born ladies of the district, with whom alone they would have been allowed to associate; and there was native pride enough in themselves to prevent them from forming friendships with the farmers’ daughters, also very widely scattered and few in number, who, though the young ladies of Drumcarro were so little superior to themselves in any outward attribute, would have thought their acquaintance an honour. Nothing accordingly could exceed the dulness, the monotony of their lives, with no future, no occupation except their work as almost servants in their father’s house, no hope even of those vicissitudes of youth which sometimes in a moment change a young maiden’s life. All was bald and gray about them, everything but the scenery, in which, if there is nothing else, young minds find but an imperfect compensation. Mary indeed had a compensation of another kind in the comfortable apathy of a perfectly dull and stolid character, which had little need of the higher acquirements of life. But Kirsteen with her quick temper and high spirit and lively imagination was little adapted for a part so blank. She was one of those who make a story for themselves.
Marg’ret was perhaps the only individual in the world who dared to remonstrate with Mr. Douglas as to the neglect in which his daughters were losing their youth and all its pleasures and hopes. Aunt Eelen it is true made comments from time to time. She said: “Puir things, what will become of them when Neil’s deed? They’ve neither siller nor learning; and no chance of a man for one of them that I can see.”