When Colonel Mannering reached the house he found his old acquaintance paralysed, helpless, waiting for the postchaise to take him away. Mannering's evident emotion at once attained him the confidence of Lucy Bertram. The laird showed no signs of recognising Mannering; but when the man, Gilbert Glossin, who had brought him to this pass, had the effrontery to make his appearance, he started up, violently reproaching him, sank into his chair again, and died almost without a groan.
A torrent of sympathy now poured forth, the sale was postponed, and Mannering decided on making a short tour till it should take place, but he was called back to Westmoreland, and, owing to the delay of his messenger, the estate passed into the hands of Glossin. Lucy and Dominie Sampson, who would not be separated from his pupil, found a temporary home in the house of Mr. MacMorlan, the sheriff-substitute, a good friend of the family.
Colonel Mannering lost no time in hiring for a season a large and comfortable mansion not far from Ellangowan, having some hopes of ultimately buying that estate. Besides a sincere desire to serve the distressed, he saw the advantage his daughter Julia might receive from the company of Lucy Bertram, whose prudence and good sense might be relied on, and therefore induced her to become the visitor of a season, and the dominie thereupon required no pressing to accept the office of librarian. The household was soon settled in its new quarters, and the young ladies followed their studies and amusements together.
Society was quickly formed, most of the families in the neighbourhood visited Colonel Mannering, and Charles Hazlewood soon held a distinguished place in his favour and was a frequent visitor, his parents quite forgetting their old fear of his boyish attachment to penniless Lucy Bertram in the thought that the beautiful Miss Mannering, of high family, with a great fortune, was a prize worth looking after. They did not know that the colonel's journey to Westmoreland was in consequence of a letter from his friend there expressing uneasiness about serenades from the lake beside the house. However, he had returned without making any discovery or any advance in his daughter's confidence, who might have told him that Brown still lived, had not her natural good sense and feeling been warped by the folly of a misjudging, romantic mother, who had called her husband a tyrant until she feared him as such.