He had succeeded to his father’s little estate when he was still in his twenties, and had many aspirations. He had not intended to withdraw from the bar, although he had few clients to speak of. He had indeed fully intended to follow up his profession, and it had not seemed impossible that he might attain to the glorious position of Lord Advocate, or, if not, to that of Sheriff-Substitute, which was perhaps more probable. But by degrees, and especially after his marriage, he had found out that professional work was a great “tie,” and that there were many things to be done at home.
His first wife had been the only daughter of the minister, which concentrated his affections still more and more in his own locality. When she died, leaving him with two children, who had never been troublesome to him before, the neighbourhood was moved with the deepest sympathy for poor Ogilvie. Some people even thought he would not survive it, they had been so united a couple, and lived so entirely for each other: or, at least, that he would go away, abandoning the scene of his past happiness.
But, on the contrary, he stayed at home, paying the tribute of the profoundest dulness for one year to the lost partner of his life, cheering up a little decorously afterwards, and at the end of the second year marrying again. All this was done, it will be seen, in the most respectable and well-regulated way, as indeed was everything that Mr. Ogilvie did when he took time to think of it, being actuated by a conscientious desire to do his duty, and set an example to all honest and virtuous men.
Mrs. Ogilvie was not too young to be the second wife of a gentleman of fifty. She was “quite suitable,” everybody said--which, seeing that he might have married a chit of twenty, as mature widowers have been known to do, was considered by everybody a virtuous abstinence and concession to the duties of the position. She was thirty-five, good-looking, even handsome, and very conscientious. If it was her husband’s virtuous principle to submit to personal inconvenience rather than do anything that he knew to be wrong, she went many steps farther in the way of excellence, and seldom did anything unless she was convinced that it was right.