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All which you must take as introductory to the important fact that the said Miss Annie, who, as a matter of course, was "very bonnie," as well as passing rich to be, had been, somewhat previous to the prince's entry to the town, pledged to be married to no less considerable a personage than Maister John Menelaws, a son of him of the very same name who dealt in pelts in a shop of the Canongate, and a student of medicine in the Edinburgh University; but as the councillor had in his secret soul hankerings after the prince, and the said student, John, was a red-hot royalist, the marriage was suspended, all to the inexpressible grief of our "bonnie Annie," who would not have given her John for all the Charlies and Geordies to be found from Berwick to Lerwick.
You may now see where the strange land lies; nor was Annie blind. She concluded in an instant, and with a horror that thrilled through her whole body, that Menelaws had murdered his rival. She had lain for ten years in the arms of a murderer. She had borne to him five children. Nay, she loved him with all the force of an ardent temperament.
All the requests of her husband for an explanation she resisted, and indeed they were not long persisted in, for Menelaws no doubt gauged the reason of her obduracy a conclusion the more likely that he subsequently left Scotland. I have reason to believe that some of the existing Menelaws' are descended from this strange union.
It was on the occasion of the flitting that Annie had to rummage an old trunk which Menelaws, long after the marriage, had brought from the house of his father, the dealer in pelts. There at the bottom, covered over by a piece of brown paper, she found what? The very slipper which matched the one she still secretly retained in her possession. Verbum sapienti.
It was not for Annie to proffer a reason, and it did not seem to be the wish of Menelaws to ask one. In a short time afterwards they were married. The new-married couple, apparently happy in the enjoyment of an affection which had continued so long, and had survived the crossing of a new love, at least on one side, removed to a separate house farther up in the Lawnmarket.
Nor within all this time did John Menelaws enter the house of the councillor; so that Annie's days were renounced to sadness, and her nights to reveries. But at last comes the eventful "one day" of the greatest of all story-tellers, Time, whereon happen his startling discoveries.
As the days passed, Annie saw some new qualities in the martyr prisoner which she had not seen before; nay, the pretty little domestic attentions had the usual reflex effect upon the heart which administered them, and all that the recurring image of Menelaws could do to fight against these rising predilections was so far unavailing, that that very image waxed dimmer and dimmer, while the present object was always working through the magic of sensation.
On the other hand, while Annie was depressed, and forced to seek relief in solitary musings in her bower by the loch, it is just as true that "it is an ill wind that blaws naebody gude;" nay, the truth of the saying was verified in Richard Templeton, a fellow-student of Menelaws, and a rival, too, in the affections of Annie; who, being a Charlieite as well as an Annieite, rejoiced that his companion was in the meantime foiled and disappointed.
Menelaws had previously graduated as a doctor, and he commenced to practise as such, not without an amount of success. Meanwhile the councillor died, leaving Annie a considerable fortune. In the course of somewhere about ten years they had five children. They at length resolved on occupying the old house with the garden, for Annie's reluctance became weakened by time.
He at once thought of the councillor's house, with that secluded back garden and summer-house, all so convenient for secrecy, and the envied Annie there, too, whom he might by soft wooings detach from the hated Menelaws, and make his own through the medium of the pity that is akin to love.
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