Lady Victoria Campbell

THE HOUSEHOLD FRIENDS 21
vision, there was no question as to her remaining in
such service. The Argylls who identified them-
selves with Rome had no existence for Elizabeth
King ! To her there was only one ' great Marquis/
and one ' testifying Earl/ They had laid their heads
on the scaffold, and for Christ's Crown and Covenant,
no one doubted that if called upon, this daughter
of the Covenant would also have faced cheerfully
stake or gallows.
" The grace of toleration or Christian charity had
lagged behind in Kingie's education, and long years
after, when the children repeated something akin to
bitterness from the lips of their beloved old woman,
the mother said gravely : ' Perhaps better not talk
to Kingie of Roman Catholics/ To be strictly just,
we must hint that on this occasion Kingie's wrath
had broken out on the question of some of her
Duke's rights being interfered with, which led her to
express a doubt whether she could go through the
ceremony of wearing mourning for one who had not
put her master's claims in the first rank for considera-
tion. I can recall my father's quiet smile as he
listened to his children's tales of the caustic remarks,
and my mother's reproof ; while he, silent and
absorbed, divided his time between his public work
and watching by the death-bed of the Dowager
Duchess, who had been associated with his boyhood
since he was seven years old. He received her last
directions and her dying blessing, for, however they
had differed in outward forms, they had met at the
end, in the ties of family life, and of conduct not