Aunt
Peggy, who was much older than her brother, had died only four years
ago, at eighty-eight, having kept her faculties to the last, and
handed down many traditions to her great-niece. The old lady's
father had been contemporary with the Margaret of ghostly fame, so
that the stages had been few through which it had come down from
1708 to 1830.
I wrote it down at once, as it here stands.
Margaret was the only daughter of the elder branch of the Fordyces.
Her father had intended her to marry her cousin, the male heir on
whom the Hillside estates and the advowson of that living were
entailed; but before the contract had been formally made, the father
was killed by accident, and through some folly and ambition of her
mother's (such seemed to be the Fordyce belief), the poor heiress
was married to Sir James Winslow, one of the successful intriguers
of the days of the later Stewarts, and with a family nearly as old,
if not older, than herself. Her own children died almost at their
birth, and she was left a young widow. Being meek and gentle, her
step-sons and daughters still ruled over Chantry House. They
prevented her Hillside relations from having access to her whilst in
a languishing state of health, and when she died unexpectedly, she
was found to have bequeathed all her property to her step-son,
Philip Winslow, instead of to her blood relations, the Fordyces.
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