Robert flung the last of his seed corn into the earth with a sigh of thankfulness, for though he gave the powers of his body to the labors of the farm, he refused to bestow on them his thoughts or his cares. He longed to seek the quiet of his attic room, for his soul was bursting with song and his nervous fingers fairly itched to grasp his pencil and catch and hold forever the pearls dropped from the lap of the Goddess Muse into his worshipful soul, ere they faded and dissolved into lusterless fragments. Mechanically he turned his footsteps toward the cottage, plunged in deep reverie. As he walked slowly along his mind suddenly reverted to the year he had spent in Mauchline. It had been his first taste of town life. Blessed with a strong appetite for sociability, although constitutionally melancholy, and a hair-brained imagination, he had become an immediate favorite and welcome guest wherever he visited. _Vive l’amour_ and _vive la bagatelle_ had soon become his sole principle of action. His heart, which was completely tinder, was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other, and it was not long before he regarded illicit love with levity, which two months previously he had thought of with horror. Poesy was still a darling walk for his mind, but it was only indulged in according to the humor of the hour. Having no aim in life he had been easily led from the paths of virtue into many forms of dissipation, which, when indulged in, afterwards plunged him into the deepest melancholy. A few months after his advent into the village he had met Jean Armour, the daughter of a master builder. She was one of the belles of Mauchline, a wild, willful, imprudent lass, whose sensual charms soon ensnared the susceptible heart of the unsophisticated farmer lad. The fatal defect of his character was the comparative weakness of his volition, and his passions, once lighted up, soon carried him down the stream of error and swept him over the precipice he saw directly in his course. Such being their temperaments, it was not to be wondered at when their procedure soon became decidedly irregular, their intimacy becoming the common talk and gossip of Mauchline. A few months before Robert returned to Mossgiel farm Jean had received an invitation from her god-parents, Lord and Lady Glencairn, to visit Edinburgh, which she had accepted with eagerness, for she was becoming tired of her latest conquest and longed for the gay life of the capital.