After the failure, and during the preparations for abandoning the house in Edinburgh, Scott records in his diary:--"It is with a sense of pain that I leave behind a parcel of trumpery prints and little ornaments, once the pride of Lady Scott's heart, but which she saw consigned with indifference to the chance of an auction.

Things that have had their day of importance with me, I cannot forget, though the merest trifles; but I am glad that she, with bad health, and enough to vex her, has not the same useless mode of associating recollections with this unpleasant business."[9] Poor Lady Scott! It was rather like a bird of paradise mating with an eagle.

Yet the result was happy on the whole; for she had a thoroughly kindly nature, and a true heart.

Within ten days before her death, Scott enters in his diary:--"Still welcoming me with a smile, and asserting she is better." She was not the ideal wife for Scott; but she loved him, sunned herself in his prosperity, and tried to bear his adversity cheerfully.

In her last illness she would always reproach her husband and children for their melancholy faces, even when that melancholy was, as she well knew, due to the approaching shadow of her own death.
FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 8: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix.