The sequel was the last of the anti-climaxes which marked the affair. Clarinda reached Jamaica to find James M’Lehose’s disposition not sweetened by time, and a brood of mulatto children proved that he had not suffered by her absence. She returned to Scotland on the same ship which took her out. For some time after her return she did not communicate with Burns. When she did so it was in terms of cautious esteem which inspired him to so bombastic a reply that he shortly afterwards tried to disguise its date by describing a transcript of it as ‘the fustian rant of enthusiastic youth’. The first part of the description is accurate. For Burns the episode was closed, and closed, as it had opened, in posturing affectation of emotion. But Clarinda lived on it for the rest of her long life, exhibiting his letters to her friends after his death until some of them were worn to tatters. Her caution, however, equalled her vanity. After some of the letters had been surreptitiously transcribed and published in 1802 she went over the manuscripts, destroying the addresses, scoring out or clipping away proper names and erasing some of the more ardent love-making, and being reduced at last in senile old-age to selling some of them for a few shillings each. Sylvander’s was the happier fate after all. Meanwhile, whatever bombast or adoration her husband was addressing to Clarinda, the ‘certain woman’ was lavishing on Burns the devotion he had wished for at his first meeting. Various stories are told of how and when he acknowledged Jean as his wife. The probability is that he never did so, in the sense of going through a formal marriage service. On April 28th he confided to James Smith that ‘Mrs. Burns’ was Jean’s ‘private designation’; a month later, in a letter to Ainslie, he avowed the title ‘to the World’. By Scots law, avowal in the presence of witnesses constituted a legal, though irregular, marriage; a peculiar letter to Smith at the end of June suggests that Burns even evaded this legal requirement: ‘I have waited on Mr. Auld about my Marriage affair, & stated that I was legally fined for an irregular marriage by a Justice of the Peace.--He says if I bring an attestation of this by the two witnesses, there shall be no more litigation about it.--As soon as this comes to hand, please write me in the way of familiar Epistle that, “Such things are.”’