She must have been a sort of nursery governess, for Mrs.St.Leger once told him that she helped her to educate the child.
"Then, father," I said, "if she helped to educate the child she ought to have been called Miss MacSkelpie!" When my first-cousin-once-removed, Rupert, was twelve years old, his mother died, and he was in the dolefuls about it for more than a year.
Miss MacKelpie kept on living with him all the same.

Catch her quitting! That sort don't go into the poor-house when they can keep out! My father, being Head of the Family, was, of course, one of the trustees, and his uncle Roger, brother of the testator, another.

The third was General MacKelpie, a poverty-stricken Scotch laird who had a lot of valueless land at Croom, in Ross-shire.

I remember father gave me a new ten-pound note when I interrupted him whilst he was telling me of the incident of young St.Leger's improvidence by remarking that he was in error as to the land.

From what I had heard of MacKelpie's estate, it was productive of one thing; when he asked me "What ?" I answered "Mortgages!" Father, I knew, had bought, not long before, a lot of them at what a college friend of mine from Chicago used to call "cut-throat" price.