Away down at The Mains it was high summer, and the low-lying, wood-encircled old white house lay brooding in the August heat. The bees hummed in the lime tree, and in the spruce woods the pigeons crooned all day, but the rooks in the plane trees kept their cawing till the evening.
But in these days there were great changes at The Mains; not only those deliberate changes, due to the slow workings of nature, which are common to the obscure places of the world, but the more violent ones which come of the striving and the energy of man, or rather woman. In the first place, Mrs. Graham, that tremendous creature, had married all her daughters, every one, save, indeed, the predestined old maid of the family, who, though she had had (as her mother frequently reminded her) the best chances of them all, in an Edinburgh season, was mateless still. By remorseless energy, by ceaseless harping on the subject, had this stringent mother goaded six daughters into matrimony against tremendous odds. One, as we know, had 'taken' Mr. Cheape; two had married ministers--albeit one had been a 'wanter,' i.e., a widower, with a numerous infant family. Another had captured a soldier lad, a subaltern in a marching regiment, quartered, during some manoeuvres of the County Militia, at the town of C----. Yet another had espoused a surgeon, while one, alas! the pretty Sally, barely at sixteen, had run away with a handsome shepherd off her father's farm. Hot was the hue and cry after the misguided lassie; her father spurred to overtake the couple and prevent the union, but returned crestfallen--thankful, eventually, to have been shown the marriage lines. This episode was no great feather in the maternal cap, and poor Sally's name was conspicuously absent from the fly-leaf of the family Bible. The mistress of The Mains now rested from her match-making labours, and devoted, henceforth, all her energies to the insane indulgence of her only son--now a pampered and disagreeable boy of ten.
In these times would Mrs. Graham publicly announce among her neighbours that she did not intend to marry off her daughter Alison. Disgraceful though it was to have a girl left on your hands, yet one unmarried daughter was not unuseful. Jacky would need a housekeeper until he married. After that great event, Alison's future might be nebulous, but in no case was it a matter of very great importance.