Out of the mass of legend and conjecture the only solid facts which emerge are that during this spring of 1786 Burns was having some sort of a love affair with Mary; that she left Ayrshire in May, and that she died in the early autumn. Burns may have turned to her for consolation after the breach with Jean; the affairs may have been simultaneous. Most biographers incline to the sequel theory on the naïve assumption that love affairs, unlike electric batteries, are always mounted in series and never in parallel. In view of the social attitude of the Ayrshire peasantry the question of whether or not Mary was technically chaste is both metaphysical and irrelevant. Burns’s attitude toward the other sex was direct; perhaps the strongest argument for Mary’s chastity would be the complete lack of reference to her in his contemporary letters, were it not for his subsequent description of her as ‘as charming a girl as ever blessed a man with generous love’. Burns ordinarily meant such expressions in the most literal sense. Despite the evidence in the Bibles that he had tried again to do the right thing it is hard to believe that in retrospect Mary would have touched him any more deeply than Jenny Clow or Anne Park later did had it not been for her untimely death. She certainly meant little in May and June of 1786. In the same month in which he gave her the Bible he composed the long and bawdy ‘Court of Equity’; throughout the summer his letters to his intimates mingle execration, devotion, and regret for Jean Armour in precisely the same tones he had used in April. A man who had really found an adequate new love might be supposed to speak of the old one as Burns had spoken of Peggy Thomson in 1784. Resentment of the Armours’ conduct might explain the execration, but hardly the regret and certainly not the devotion. If Burns really intended to make a new start in Jamaica with Mary Campbell, it is strange indeed that he never hinted of it to his friends--unless we accept the tradition, reported at second hand from John Richmond, that Mary was a light-skirts whose character Richmond and some other friends exposed to the poet. In that case, he would have had good reason for silence.