At the corner of the fire sat an old lady, in a chair high-backed, thick-padded, and covered with striped stuff.

She had her back to the window that looked into the court, and was knitting without regarding her needles.

This was Cosmo's grandmother.

The daughter of a small laird in the next parish, she had started in life with an overweening sense of her own importance through that of her family, nor had she lived long enough to get rid of it.

I fancy she had clung to it the more that from the time of her marriage nothing had seemed to go well with the family into which she had married.