Uncle George, last seen in 1803 receiving the encumbrances Jane and Yorrick into his Berners Street house, was not a man to dwell on failure and its consequences. Once the children had been consigned to the Mr. Tulloch who brought them up north, they apparently dropped from his consciousness, for Uncle George's surviving letters in the Gordon Cumming Depository make no mention either of Jane or of Yorrick. In 1814, however, the specter of their father, his late and hitherto unlamented nephew George, briefly came back to haunt him. His second coming gave the now sixty-two-year-old uncle, losing his eyesight but still involved in profitable financial speculation and East India Company affairs, the opportunity to reflect on the harsh attitude and unkind words he had directed toward the young man who had not made it to his thirtieth birthday.

Sometime around June of that year, the uncle received a parcel containing George's nymph poems of 1794. He wrote George's brother Sir William on June 14, telling him that he was “putting the parcel in [his] trunk.” The perusal of Colonel Lawtie's letter and the poems written by his “poor brother,” he said, would give “pleasure (tho’ a melancholy pleasure)”; he advised him to remember that they were written “more than 20 years ago, and wrote [sic] without the most distant idea of being seen by anyone, but to the person they are addressed.” Lawtie's letter has not survived, but Sir William, who had at best only the faintest memories of his elder brother, saved his brother's effusions.

In 1811 Lords Hope, Meadowbank, Robertson, Newton, and Boyle visited the house in Drumsheugh that the year before had been Woods and Pirie's boarding school. By 1816, when the Law Lords began reviewing the documents, the house had been demolished. Meadowbank and Newton were dead, as was Lord Polkemmet, who had cast the deciding vote without ever attending a session. So was Lord Woodhouselee, and one of the most articulate witnesses, Elizabeth Hamilton.

Helen was very much alive. In the winter of 1816, the sixty-two-year old was living at 22 Charlotte Square.