He returned to Mauchline on the 22d to receive his six weeks of Excise instructions, publicly to acknowledge Jean as his wife, and incidentally to compose a formula whereby to explain his action to his friends and patrons: ‘I had a long and much-loved fellow creature’s happiness or misery in my determination, and I durst not trifle with so important a deposite.’ This statement with only slight variations he used to half-a-dozen different correspondents. Whether he used it to Clarinda or not is uncertain; he may have entrusted Ainslie with the delicate task of breaking the news. However the news reached her, it quite naturally angered her. If Burns wrote it to her she destroyed the letter, and we know that he destroyed her reply calling him a Villain and accusing him of perfidious treachery. When he visited Edinburgh again in February, 1789, she refused to see him and told Ainslie that she intended to keep away from her windows while he was in town lest she catch a glimpse of him in the street. In the fall of 1791, however, she had a chance to reopen the correspondence. Jenny Clow in June, 1788, had undertaken some sort of legal action against Burns and one purpose of his return to Edinburgh in the following February had been to settle with her. Whatever the nature of the settlement it had not helped much. When in 1791 Jenny somehow communicated with Clarinda, the latter found the girl ill, destitute, and friendless, in a miserable lodging. Clarinda’s discovery of the means whereby Sylvander had managed to keep his courtship on so lofty a plane must have been humiliating and disillusioning, but she was woman enough to turn her discovery to account. Her letter to Burns described Jenny’s condition briefly and effectively and suggested that there was a striking contrast between his practice and the high principles of generosity and humanity which he professed. She meant her letter to sting, and it did. Burns begged her to relieve Jenny’s immediate needs and promised personal action at the first opportunity. At this point Jenny vanishes from the record. What Burns did, whether Jenny lived or died, whether her son lived or died, if he lived what became of him--all these are questions without answers. Meanwhile Clarinda had been attempting to re-establish her own life. Her husband had sought a reconciliation, and she was planning to join him in Jamaica. When Burns made his last visit to Edinburgh in November, 1791, her departure was already arranged. She was fully reconciled to Sylvander now, and for the first time their relationship revealed simple and genuine emotion. The Arcadian names vanished in the correspondence; she became ‘my dearest Nancy’ instead of Clarinda, and when Burns returned to Dumfries, fully convinced that he had said farewell forever, he produced the one really first-rate lyric Clarinda ever inspired--‘Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We Sever’.