There are various curious old legends and traditions of all countries and ages--travesties, like the swallowing of the pomegranate seeds by Proserpine--of the sacred record of the eating of the apple in Paradise--which illustrate the danger of tasting forbidden fruit. If a man or woman who hesitates is apt to be lost, the weak individual who prees and prees as Rab and Allan preed the famous peck o’ maut which Willie brewed, till nothing of the peck remains, is still more likely to become the victim of a fatal appetite. Within a month poor old Cunnings had fallen lower before her mortal enemy, and disgraced herself more irretrievably than she had done in the whole course of her long service. She had been so helpless in her degradation that she could not ‘bite a finger’ in the customary phrase, though why the wretched sinner should seek to accomplish such a useless performance in the circumstances has not been explained. She had been seen in this state, and had been put to bed, the guilty woman, like an innocent baby, by one of the more compassionate of the mocking under-servants, to whom Cunnings ought to have served as an example while she ruled over them. She knew it all--the extent of her transgression, the shame of it, the degree to which she had exposed herself. She was down in the mire, and did not believe she could ever rise again and free herself from its defilement, while her infatuated base propensity was tempting her to lie and wallow in the dirt, so that she could gratify the horrible craving. She shrank from poor Peggy, who, in place of challenging and denouncing her housekeeper, was fit to break her heart over Cunnings’s lamentable breakdown. Cunnings was terrified to meet her old mistress. She became the bond-slave of Jenny Hedderwick, who had led the older woman into temptation and was now prepared to feed her vice, so that it might serve Jenny’s evil ends. There never was so thorough a moral ruin effected in so short a time. The truth is that a man liable to Cunnings’s sin might have indulged in it, succumbed so far, and still have continued true to the trust reposed in him and to one half of his better antecedents. He might have escaped a complete collapse, and saved his integrity and honour. But it is a well-known melancholy instance of psychological difference between men and women that, whereas there remains a reservation and some power of resistance, even of retaining a few of the finer traits of character in the drunken man, in the case of the woman, in whom reason is weaker and passion stronger, an indulgence in an excess of intoxicating drink is prone to open the flood-gates to all corruption, and to produce a complete demoralisation of the individual. There was no further hope or help for Peggy from Cunnings.