Of the many things in Burns’s life which might better have been left unsaid or undone this letter might claim first place were it not for the one he wrote to Bob Ainslie ten days later. Here he describes his reconciliation with Jean. What makes this letter revolting is not so much its biological detail as the realization that the alleged events which Burns describes occurred less than a fortnight before Jean’s confinement. On March 3 she again bore her lover twins, who did not live even long enough to be baptized. Still worse, if it is true, is his assertion that he had sworn Jean ‘privately and solemnly never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim, which she has not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl....’ Here, however, it is more than possible that he was talking brazenly for Ainslie’s edification; Henley’s doubt that Mrs. Armour could have been reconciled to her daughter without a promise of marriage seems well founded. Moreover the statement proves that by this time, whatever he may have thought in 1786, Burns realized that the destruction of the original marriage lines had not necessarily voided the contract. Whatever he said or did at his first interview with Jean he must, before he returned to Edinburgh in March, have made up his mind that sooner or later he would acknowledge Jean as his wife. The letters to Clarinda during the remaining two weeks of his absence were noticeably lacking in fervour. They contained, however, more news about his personal affairs, especially the doubts and uncertainties that still kept him hesitating between farming and the Excise, than any of the earlier ones did. An unsolved mystery in his life is the nature of his relations with Clarinda during the fortnight he spent in Edinburgh in March. To the modern reader with full knowledge of the facts the fervour of his latest letters seems still more forced and artificial than before, but it may be questioned if this truth was equally obvious to Clarinda. Indeed their final meeting, at which Burns presented her with a pair of drinking-glasses, a poem, and an inscribed copy of Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’, clearly had enough romantic intensity to satisfy even Clarinda. Herein lies the mystery. The later developments prove that Burns had told her nothing of his reconciliation with Jean, yet Burns was not a man who could ordinarily act a part convincingly. This time he must have tried. The results, combined with anxiety over livelihood, are displayed in a letter of March 20, in which he told Richard Brown that worry over his lease, ‘racking shop accounts’ with Creech, ‘together with watching, fatigue, and a load of care almost too heavy for my shoulders, have in some degree actually fever’d me.... These eight days, I have been positively crazed.’