There are some people to whom to vouch-safe an inch is to grant a yard, in whatever request is pending--people who, if they are permitted to insert a finger in an opening will forthwith introduce the whole hand and break down every impediment to their will. This was true of Jenny and the family supper to which Baldie Fuggie was to be bidden. First, Johnnie must come also, because he was Baldie’s uncle and nearest surviving relation. Next, Johnnie’s wife and children could not be left out, and after them Baldie had one or two other friends with whom he had been much more intimate, among the shopkeepers, sewing-girls, and maid-servants of Craigie--honest lads and lasses well-known to Jenny--and Peggy also in the days when she was not mistress of Drumsheugh. It could do no harm to have them for once up at the house to see that their old friend had not forgotten them and wished them well. She could take leave of them, for that matter, in this handsome, informal manner. Then the gathering might be in Cunnings’s room, and it might be called Cunnings’s and Jenny’s little party, merely permitted and countenanced by young Mrs. Ramsay. Thus no reasonable person could find fault with ‘the bit ploy.’ Peggy was led on, half unconscious how far she was going, with dust thrown into her eyes at every reluctant step. But for any preparation she had received and permission she had given, she was not the less overwhelmed and aghast at the size and style of the entertainment when it burst fully upon her in the hour of its celebration. It was far too late then to stop the details--supposing the mistress of Drumsheugh had possessed the strength of mind and the mother-wit to issue an interdict and organise on the spur of the moment something very different. Jenny had actually bespoken a fiddler. Before Peggy could believe her eyes that Tam Lauder, the young gauger, had taken it upon him to bring his fiddle in its green bag, there were reels forming on the floor, and she could not refuse to let herself be ‘lifted’ (led to the top of the set) to take the first turn, lest folk should say she was proud and held herself above dancing in the same rounds with her old friends, she who had been born and bred a cotter lass, and had footed it blithely with the laird and Balcairnie at many a maiden! Oh! how far removed from this those dances had been, when she had lived free from responsibility, and her grandest title had been ‘Bonnie Peggy.’